Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Dan Williams]

On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 08:30 +0300, Jar wrote:
> Reik Red wrote:
> > Pavel Roskin wrote:
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> I have figured out a way to use wpa_supplicant and dhclient on the same
> >> interface in Fedora (tested on Fedora 8 and Fedora 9).  I'm actually
> >> surprised that I don't see loud screams that it's not working.  It's
> >> quite possible that I'm missing something obvious that everybody else it
> >> doing.  Then I apologize for the noise in advance.  Anyway, that's the
> >> simplest solution I could find.
> >>   
> 
> I personally usually just edit the /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant
> so that it will start before network service
> (chkconfig:   - 23 88 --> chkconfig:   - 9 90) and everything works. 
> Also the section:
> 
> ### BEGIN INIT INFO
> # Provides: wpa_supplicant
> # Required-Start: $local_fs messagebus
> # Required-Stop: $local_fs messagebus
> # Default-Start:
> # Default-Stop: 0 1 6
> # Short-Description: start and stop wpa_supplicant
> # Description: wpa_supplicant is a tool for connecting to wireless networks
> ### END INIT INFO
> 
> has to be deleted because otherwise wpa_supplicant service try to start 
> after messagebus (even if in /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant the D-Bus 
> interface is not enabled) and it is too late for dhcp. I think the 
> wireless stuff should also work in text mode without the help of X & NM.

The reason it's not started before the network service is that the
supplicant is in /usr/sbin.  So requiring the supplicant to start before
network will break on setups that use network-mounted-/usr.  While it's
true that using network-mounted-usr over wireless would be just plain
dumb and thus they shouldn't really conflict with each other since
people doing network mounted usr won't be using the supplicant, the main
problem is that the init system in Fedora isn't flexible enough to
handle both use-cases.  That's being fixed with F9 and F10 by using
upstart, and by making services more intelligent about their
requirements, and thus in F10 you'll be able to start the supplicant
before the network service when you aren't using network mounted usr.

Dan