Not remove interface when wpa_supplicant shuts down

[Panagiotis Georgopoulos]

Hello Pavel, all 

	Please see bellow...


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pavel Roskin [mailto:proski at gnu.org]
> Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 14:41
> To: Panagiotis Georgopoulos
> Cc: hostap at lists.shmoo.com
> Subject: Re: Not remove interface when wpa_supplicant shuts down
> 
> On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 14:31 +0100, Panagiotis Georgopoulos wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> >                 Is there a way to force wap_supplicant not to remove
> > my wireless interface (e.g. wlan0) when it shuts down?
> >
> >
> > This is really annoying as it removes all my routes as well and even
> > though I get the interface up and running when I restart
> > wpa_supplicant I have to add the routes manually after that? (by the
> > way, I think the same goes for hostapd? it removes the interface when
> > it shuts down).
> 
> The interface is not removed.  It's just brought down.  That's
> sufficient to remove the routes.  But I don't think you want to have
> active routes on an inactive interface.
> 

Sorry for not putting it correctly, yes the interface is not removed, it is just brought down, which reasonably -as you point out- removes the routes. However, this is still annoying because when the interface is brought down it loses its IP and all the related routes are removed and should be added manually. Plus, if I have wireshark capturing traffic on this interface it will whinge for the interface that was brought down. 

So if I am debugging and want to run wpa_supplicant again, I have to manually bring it up, configure its IP address, add all the routes, execute wireshark to capture traffic on it and then run wpa_supplicant (which as you imagine becomes very time consuming and tiresome). If I don't do all this manually, and I just run wpa_supplicant, it will bring the interface up, but I still would have to add the IP address and routes later, plus I would not be able to capture all the initial packets that the interface will exchange with the Aceess Point in wireshark (because the interface will be brought up by wpa_supplicant and wireshark will not be able to capture traffic on this quickly).

So, any ways to disallow wpa_supplicant or hostapd to bring an interface down when they are stopped?

Thanks in advance,
Panos