wpa_cli: windows named pipe implementation doesn't handles unsolicited messages

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 08:26:10PM +0200, Marco wrote:

> did I overlook something or is the handling for unsolicited messages
> missing in the NamedPipes part?
> There is only a single call to ReadFile() in
> wpa_ctrl.c:wpa_ctrl_request(), so the caller possibly gets a unsolicited
> message instead of the answer for his request.

This is not really specific to named pipes, but a generic issue with
using just one ctrl_iface connection for both solicited and unsolicited
messages. In case of Windows version of wpa_cli, this issue is more
likely to hit since wpa_cli does not have an easy mechanism for polling
for pending messages while waiting for the user to enter the next
command in interactive mode. Linux version uses alarm(1) to poll for
these messages which makes it less likely to have unsolicited messages
waiting to show up when the user has completed writing the command. On
Windows, pending messages are processed only when user enters a new
command (even an empty command, which will just make wpa_cli to read all
pending unsolicited messages).

The proper fix for this would be to use two ctrl_iface connections in
the same way as wpa_gui is doing, but I have wanted to keep wpa_cli an
example of the other option even though it is not really perfect for all
uses.

In order to limit the confusing messages a bit, I added another call to
wpa_cli_recv_pending() between the fgets() returning user input and
wpa_request() being used to process the next command. This will greatly
reduce the window of opportunity for unsolicited messages to be received
while a command is being processed. The output is still somewhat
confusing since the unsolicited messages are being printed between the
user input and the output of that command, but at least the command
response is being shown in most cases even if there were pending
messages when the command was entered.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA