Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 07:40 +0800, Reik Red wrote:
> 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.

It'll definitely happen by F10, but the key/value defines will be set
and should also work for F8 + F9 if somebody cares enough to develop and
backport the ifup-wireless changes too.  So F8 and F9 don't get cut off.

> 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.....

Assuming you're talking about the startup priority stuff, I'm not really
sure.  We could put some notes in /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant perhaps.
It's a question of where somebody having an issue might look.  People
might look in the release notes, but I doubt it.

> 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.

Yep.

> 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.

A wiki entry perhaps?

Dan