Re: Flaming as a way to reach technical quality? No!

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> Yes, a user can do anything with ifconfig if his time has no value.  I am
> happily using network manager on my laptop, because unlike ifconfig it's
> easy to configure for use on new wireless networks.
>
> I am not happy that network manager bypasses ifconfig to do this; I would
> have much preferred a daemon that could properly integrate with the existing
> infrastructure we had.  But neither that, nor you calling me a stupid user,
> is much motivation for me to go back to the pain of managing wireless
> connections via ifupdown.

I not going to argue against using network manager for that particular
use case.  It does provide a nice GUI for entering credentials etc. 

But I will claim that using ifupdown is also easy, given that you can
accept a CLI instead of a GUI:

You need to 

1) create a /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf with something like

 ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
 ## uncomment this entry to automatically connect to any open network
 #network={
 #   ssid=""
 #   key_mgmt=NONE
 #}

2) add this (possibly with another device name) to /etc/network/interfaces:

 allow-hotplug wlan0
 iface wlan0 inet manual
    wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

 iface default inet dhcp

3) run wpa_cli in a terminal as a user in the netdev group


Adding new networks and other management tasks can easily be done in the
wpa_cli shell.  IMHO easier than using NM, as it won't interfere with
e.g. any temporary address I've configured manually.  But this is of
course a highly subjective opinion.




Bjørn