wpa_gui and WEP modes

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:09:34PM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> I was wondering why wpa_gui does not have a checkbox or something for
> selecting shared key WEP?  This cannot be auto-detected, right?  In my
> experience so far I have to add the line
> 
> auth_alg=SHARED
> 
> manually.  So this is the only thing so far I don't see how to
> configure with the GUI, which is otherwise pretty awesome.

This is in the todo.txt:

- wpa_gui: add support for setting and showing priority, auth_alg
  (open/shared for static WEP)

I don't remember why it ended up there waiting, but maybe I did not want
to make the network configuration dialog any larger at the time. Anyway,
it looks like one way of implementing this would be to split the
"Plaintext or static WEP" authentication entry into three "Plaintext",
"WEP with Open System", "WEP with Shared Key authentication". However,
I'm somewhat concerned about that being a bit confusing for users who
may not understand the difference between the two WEP options.

As far as auto-detecting this is concerned, some drivers are able to try
both options (i.e., set auth_alg=OPEN SHARED and allow the driver to try
each). However, that may not work with all drivers.

> One more minor nit about the gui:  When I exit from my KDE session, it
> remembers that wpa_gui was running (in the tray!  I love that feature)
> and then next time I log in to KDE, it will autostart it... but it
> does not automatically minimize to the tray again, so I get the
> wpa_gui window popping up every time I log in.

This came up some time ago and so far I have not seen a complete
solution on how to get this working in the most logical way, i.e.,
return in same state that was used before the exit. One option was to
make wpa_gui start in the tray by default which would have worked in the
case you described, but would not do what I would like to see if the
main window was visible when exiting the session. In addition, that
would be unexpected change in wpa_gui starting behavior (I expect to see
the main window showing up when I run wpa_gui).

There is likely a mechanism in KDE that would allow GUI apps to store
their state somehow and then use that when KDE is launching the app
automatically next time. Once someone can figure out how to do this or
point me to documentation, I would be happy to add support for restoring
the previously used state in this case.

>  If I create a script
> in .kde/Autostart to launch it with the -t option, then I get two
> instances running.  IMHO both of these are minor bugs: it should
> remember whether it was minimized to the tray and start up the same
> way when autolaunched (somehow, but I don't understand what the
> mechanism would be for it to tell the difference); and if you run a
> second instance as the same user, it should probably just restore the
> window for the existing one rather than running an actual second
> process with a second window (and currently you can even get two icons
> on the tray if you close both of them).

As described above, I agree with the first topic. As far as starting
another process is concerned, bringing up the previously started
instance sounds reasonable for most cases. However, I do occasionally
run two instances on purpose to monitor different network interfaces,
but I would not expect that to be very common use case, so making this
depend on a command line option would be fine (bring up previous
instance by default, start new process if that new argument is used on
the command line). I would expect KDE to have a mechanism to make it
easy to figure out whether there is an already running instance of the
same GUI app, but just like with the session exit/start feature, I do
not know what this mechanism is and a pointer to documentation (or
better yet, a patch to do this) would be appreciate.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA