Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored?
On Tue 06 Dec 2016 at 23:09:59 +0100, Christian Seiler wrote:
> On 12/06/2016 09:26 PM, Brian wrote:
>
> 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.
I've never really used NetworkManager, not because I think it is lacking
in some way but because the alternatives of ifupdown, wpa_supplicant and
ConnMan etc do a good job for me and my users when at home or roaming.
> > 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.
The author of the README.Debian doesn't appear to take the same view as
you. I use what is in it as the basis for my roaming setup on a laptop.
I've just refreshed my memory on the what needs to be done: a stanza or
two in /e/n/i, a couple of lines in a wpa_supplicant.conf and an install
of wpa_gui. Connecting to a different network with wpa_gui doesn't seem
to be any more difficult than using any other GUI application.
> > 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.
I think any serious debugging of a wireless issue would inevitably
involve wpa_cli at some point. I do agree, though, that wpa_cli as a way
of end-user interaction isn't desirable in the normal course of events.
Thank goodness for NetworkManager and all the other GUI stuff.
--
Brian.
Reply to: