Use wpa_cli as NetworkManager replacement

Dan Williams dcbw
Thu May 13 08:30:13 PDT 2010


On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 01:03 -0600, Curtis Larsen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am not a developer, just a user that has several reasons to replace 
> ubuntu's network manager with something like wpa_supplicant with wpa_cli:

As an NM developer I'm interested in why it doesn't work well for you.

> - It connects faster (In general I would say 2-3x faster than ubuntu NM)

This part is interesting, but recently we've made some improvements here
if you're carrying the patch that doesn't trigger a rescan if a scan has
been done in the last 5 seconds.

> - It lets me specify 5Ghz band = double throughput at work.

Hmm; I actually wasn't aware that we could do this in the supplicant yet
(I've been waiting for it actually) and so if it's now there, I'd love
to add this capability to NetworkManager.

> - It gives me text/debug output for troubleshooting.

Have you tried --log-level=debug in recent versions of NM (which Ubuntu
may not ship yet unfortunately)?  What kind of output are you looking
for here?  There's also this:

http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/Debugging

especially the section on "Debugging WiFi Connections".

Dan

> However; I cannot seem to find documentation for how to integrate 
> wpa_cli with wpa_supplicant the way I would like to.
> 
> I would simply like to be able to launch it from the CLI, have it prompt 
> for my username/password (at work), or PSK (at home), and see the debug 
> text while it authenticates, connects, and grabs DHCP.
> 
> The closest thing I have found to this is something like this: 
> http://www.lboro.ac.uk/it/wireless/linux.html  ...but I cannot even get 
> wpa_supplicant to prompt me for a PSK so far.
> 
> Is this even possible?  Could someone walk me through the basic steps to 
> make wpa_supplicant return the wpa_cli prompt for UN or PSK like this, 
> or point me to some documentation on this?
> 
> (Right now I run the ./wpa_supplicant command,then dhclient to get dhcp 
> which works great but I want something more automated that maybe doesn't 
> leave my password or PSK in a text file)
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Curtis
> 
> _______________________________________________
> HostAP mailing list
> HostAP at lists.shmoo.com
> http://lists.shmoo.com/mailman/listinfo/hostap





More information about the Hostap mailing list