Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2018 08:25:16
From: Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
To: bw <bwtnguy@yahoo.com>
Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org, debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Newsgroups: chiark.mail.debian.devel
Subject: Re: (solved) Re: wireless fail after stretch installation
Resent-Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2018 13:25:34 +0000 (UTC)
Resent-From: debian-user@lists.debian.org
bw writes ("Re: (solved) Re: wireless fail after stretch installation"):
On Tue, 6 Mar 2018, Brian wrote:
One user calls it a "sick joke". After five years and with no attempt
to rectify the situation, I'm beginning to have sympathy with that view.
Debian, like all ordinary software, is full of bugs. Many bugs
languish unfixed for years. This is not malice, or a "sick joke".
It's just that there is too much to do and too few people to do it.
There are rare cases where horrible people deliberately sabotage
things. They are very high profile because they are so outrageous,
but they are not the norm. I see no evidence in relation to this bug
that anyone is sabotaging anything.
The correct approach to this bug is to figure out how to fix it, and
send a patch.
Brute forcing this thing with wifi to /e/n/i might not be the best
approach? What about people who want a different config than the
installer? What about people who don;t want to be UP (auto) on bootup?
What about static configs? Wifi is by nature a mobile environment, what
about security or several devices? Let's help the devs by hashing out the
pros and cons and making a coherent proposal?
We are considering the situation where the user has installed a
barebones system, with no GUI network management tools.
Such a user will probably *expect* to edit a configuration file when
they want to change their network configuration, whether because their
needs change, or because their needs are different to those of the
majority of people.
Consequently, there is no problem in principle with setting up /e/n/i
to have the wifi configuration from the install. That is what most
people who do this will want; and if it doesn't suit them, they can
change it. (It is easier to change it or delete it, than it is to set
it up from scratch.)
AFAICT from reading #694068, the reason d-i currently strips this
information out of the installed system is because it contains the
wifi password in /e/n/i, a world-readable file. That would obviously
be wrong.
Someone should implement and test the suggestion made by Trent Buck,
here,
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=694068#47
Specifically:
| If you don't want to udebify wpa_passphrase, you can do it by hand:
|
| cat >"/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-$iface.conf" <<EOF
| network={
| ssid="$ssid"
| psk="$passphrase"
| }
| EOF
This should be arranged in the appropriate bit of d-i, so that the
installed system works the same way as the installer.
Ian.