[pkg-wpa-devel] Re: Bug#376521: ITP: kwlan -- wpasupplicant frontend for KDE

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 08:29:34AM +0200, Fathi Boudra wrote:
> > As a user: can we please try to have wireless network profiles etc. stored
> > as far away from the gui as possible?  No need for the commandline, gnome,
> > KDE, xfce and gnustep wireless applets have their own set of stored
> > profiles, when they're using the same backend logic anyway...
> 
> That's right. Currently there are two reasons why wpa_profiles are not stored 
> in the default wpa_configuration files and why there are additional 
> configuration files:
> * wpa_supplicant uses global files so you cannot define profiles per 
> user, which in my oppinion is a drawback

I don't think you can really blame the wpasupplicant package here. It's
rather that ifupdown doesn't provide means to configure user based
'location' information, like say, static ips, custom openvpn connections
or proxy settings.

You can however put this in /etc/network/interfaces:

iface wlan inet manual
	pre-up /usr/local/sbin/detect-user
	wpa-roam /var/run/current-wpa_supplicant.conf

/usr/local/sbin/detect-user would be a script which detects the current
logged in user, with a same fail back (so it doesn't fail in most
cornercases), and sets a symlink in /var/run/current-wpa_supplicant.conf
to the actual user crafted (oder generated) wpa_supplicant.conf file.

This isn't really nice, I know. But you see, the current wpasupplicant
package enables other packages to provide solutions (or hacks) like
this.

> * wpa_supplicant has no options in it's config files for static ip 
> addresses, name servers etc. I would like to be able to configure dns 
> searchlists, non-default routes etc.

This is not the task for wpa_supplicant.

> Upstream author of kwlan will be happy to change kwlan's behavior if you have 
> a better solution for this.

Better work with netconf-devel [1] on a ifupdown replacement, which gets
around the limitations you currently encounter.

Gruesse,
	Reinhard


[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/netconf-devel