Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Reik Red]

Pavel Roskin wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have figured out a way to use wpa_supplicant and dhclient on the same
> interface in Fedora (tested on Fedora 8 and Fedora 9).  I'm actually
> surprised that I don't see loud screams that it's not working.  It's
> quite possible that I'm missing something obvious that everybody else it
> doing.  Then I apologize for the noise in advance.  Anyway, that's the
> simplest solution I could find.
>   
Pavel, just to back up for minute to the beginning (I'm not shooting at 
the messenger here, just getting back to the original message):

I think there has been a LOT of people screaming about these problems, 
although not necessarily in this forum. I recall spending several days, 
if not a whole week, after installing Fedora 8 on my laptop,  reading 
all kinds of documents, fora, web sites and so on before I was 
sort-of-able to get wlan0 work straight from boot. It involved all kinds 
of ugly hacks such as changing the starting order of services/chkconfig 
and so on, similar to what you did. Worst was that there is no document 
that explains 
this-is-how-you-debug-wpa_client-et-al-manually-when-things-go-wrong. 
That would really have helped. It wasn't helping either that dbus was 
not talking to wpa_supplicant, so that wpa_gui and similar helper tools 
did not work, increasing the probability of configuration problems. 
Indeed, I think wpa_gui wasn't even part of F8. Configuration errors 
coupled with starting order what-have-you problems are next to 
impossible to understand and debug for the un-initiated.

What's my point in re-hashing all of this? Well, wpa_supplicant, 
dhclient and so on are WONDERFUL efforts, but the integration of the 
system as a whole is really lacking in quality. For Fedora (or any 
linux) to take off on laptops, this stuff has got to work. People less 
ardent than myself will just dismiss linux completely until this stuff 
starts working at least a LITTLE more out of the box. Audio is in a  
close second place for the price of preventing adoption of linux on 
laptops. Pulseaudio on F8 was a disaster, with all kinds of problems 
with permissions, default settings and so on that made the system very 
hard to bring up.

So, keeping in mind some of the good discussions in this email thread, 
will the wise men of networking software components now put their heads 
together and (re-)architect the interfaces between their pieces so that 
this will all Just Work (TM)? If you do, you will be known to the world 
as having brought linux to the laptop, which is no small feat, driver 
problems be damned.

I think some more communication between fedora-list and hostap at lists 
would be a good thing. All the end-user problems of wpa_supplicant in 
the context of the bigger system show in other fora!