On 12/06/2016 09:26 PM, Brian wrote: > On Tue 06 Dec 2016 at 11:14:56 +0100, Christian Seiler wrote: > >> Note that when using NetworkManager, it configures its own >> instance of wpa_supplicant, so you should never touch a >> configuration file for wpa_supplicant yourself in this kind of >> setup. >> >> (You could of course stop using NetworkManager and configure >> wpa_supplicant manually, but I really wouldn't recommend that; >> I don't think wpa_supplicant is designed in a way that makes >> direct end-user usage easy - there's a reason why NetworkManager >> exists instead of desktop environments communicating directly >> with wpa_supplicant.) > > Direct interaction with the supplicant is not easy?
If you want to dynamically connect to a network that's not in your wpa_supplicant.conf, then yes, that's not easy to do via wpa_cli. (It's doable, just not easy or user-friendly.) If you then want to combine a dynamically-added configuration with something like DHCP, then it's even worse. Of course, if you edit the wpa_supplicant.conf every time you want to connect to a new network, and tear down and restart the entire wifi interface, sure, that'll work, but it doesn't fit well into the WiFi model. That all said: I'm not a huge fan of NetworkManager, I think some aspects of it are not well enough thought out to my taste - but it does it's job in the case of WiFi, and it does it well, better than the alternatives I've seen so far. > However, it is worth acknowledging that Debian has the most complete > integration of ifupdown with wpa_supplicant you will find. It also has > excellent documentation to help with explaining this integration. There > are some things Debian does so well that they are unsurpassable. Yes, and the primary use case I see for this are headless servers or similar that are connected via WiFi, where the connection rarely changes. I would not want to use that on a laptop though, because you never know when you'll want to connect to a different network. > Just in case you think you > cannot point and click when you have direct enduser control over the > supplicant, think again. There is wpa-gui. Last time I tried wpa_gui troubleshooting with it was a huge mess, and I had to resort to wpa_cli to actually get some sensible information about what was going on. Maybe that has improved since (it's been a couple of years), but my experiences with it have been bad. Regards, Christian
