Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Reik Red]

Dan Williams wrote:
> 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
>   

Dan, very glad to hear that there is a long-term solution coming to the 
problem, but I'm bummed out that it cannot happen until F10.

In the meanwhile, there will still be a lot of people having the same 
problem that Pavel, Jar and I did, in fact there is an active (as of two 
days ago)  thread in the fedora-list mailing list about the same general 
class of problem. What do you think would be a good way to communicate 
to people that this is a known problem, as well as showing them a 
canonical work-around, and give them the above timeline on the "real" 
fix? Also, a generic methodology that describes how to debug 
wpa_supplicant usage problems would be nice. I realize this is not all 
"your department", but.....

Mailing lists are great, but the audience is transient and often 
limited, as is the case on the hostap list. Web searches often lead to 
very non-authoritative answers and less-than-optimal hacks by people 
such as myself, and not THE solution.

Is there a web page where the information could be posted for reference? 
I think that would save a lot of work for you an others in the end.