[Dapper] Who decided to hose wpasupplicant?

[Darryl Clarke]

On 25/03/06, Stephen R Laniel <steve at laniels.org> wrote:
> I was just trying to figure out why my network connection
> was uncommonly slow, so I did an iwconfig and noticed that I
> was connecting to a neighbor's unencrypted access point
> rather than to my own WPA-encrypted one. This would explain
> the slowness. So I did a 'ps aux' and noticed that
> wpasupplicant was not in fact running. This was odd. Next
> step was to run '/etc/init.d/wpasupplicant start', which ...
> doesn't exist anymore! In its place is
>
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1782 2005-10-30 07:43 /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant.dpkg-bak
>
> Well that's odd. Where did it go? Look in the
> README.Debian file ... ah ha! Aparently all the
> functionality has been moved from /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
> into /etc/network/interfaces. Except not really: no one
> bothered to migrate my existing WPA configuration to the
> new format. And it's not a simple matter of copying the
> entries from the old wpa configuration into
> /etc/network/interfaces.
>
[snip]

I agree, it should have migrated settings... The time it took you to
write up this email would've made for a good bug report... :)
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/wpasupplicant/+bugs

WPA Supplicant's support is being split to a more configurable user
space... (and it's about time! ;))  Network Manager (0.6) supports it
directly, and as you stated /etc/network/interfaces supports it
directly as well (i hope for the sake of configuration the Network
Config tool is also updated!).  This all eliminates the need for
wpasupplicant to be run at startup and instead being run when the
wireless is actually enabled.



--
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
~ http://darrylclarke.com