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Author: Isaac Dunham
Date:  
To: shraptor
CC: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Wireless configuration tools (was: Re: Systemd Shims)
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 09:53:39PM +0200, shraptor wrote:
>
> >Long story short: it's limited, somewhat odd in interface, and nearly
> >undocumented.
> >But if you've configured wpa_supplicant to start, or need to write an
> >initial config file, it should be adequate if you can follow the UI.
> >I tried to make the UI as obvious as possible, but I'm the only user
> >I'm aware of, so no promises ;-).
>
>
> What do you mean by limited? limited by scarce documentation?
> limited in user-friendliness?


Features (and user-friendliness, to a lesser degree).
It only supports adding open/WEP/WPA networks, viewing available
networks ("4 scan" in the main menu), and disconnect/reassociate.
If you want to add and use a new network, you will need to manually
reassociate.
There is no way to configure how you get an IP address/how routing and
DNS is set up in wpa_config; wpa_dhcp provides these in theory, but
there are some major caveats (see my next comment).

> Well I am thinking of trying it.
>
> It depends on udhcpc and ifup/ifdown
> Are these provided by busybox?


Yes.
Only wpa_dhcp requires these; on a Debian system, I'd suggest replacing
this script with wpa_action, since there's not any functional support for
different networks with different networking configs (you get either
DHCP everywhere, or--if you configure it--the same static IP and routing
everywhere; I only use DHCP).
If you use wpa_action on a Busybox system, you'll need to port it
to use udhcpc.

> Are there other dependencies except wpa-supplicant, wpa-cli


For wpa_config, the part you're probably most interested in, you need
- a POSIX shell
- (POSIX) cat grep echo test true mktemp
- awk, for the scan feature (tested with busybox awk and mawk; gawk and
the "one true awk" should also work)
- wpa_supplicant and wpa_cli, of course
- dialog or an adequate clone (also tested with whiptail, xdialog may work).

On a minimal busybox system, you can build ncurses, dialog, and
wpa_supplicant. Contrary to the whiptail documentation, it uses
significantly *more* disk space than dialog, unless you don't use
ncurses at all and already use newt.

> Does it require something like OpenRC or would it work with
> busybox init?


OpenRC is a set of utilities and scripts that can be run atop sysvinit
or busybox init. I've only used it with Busybox init.

etc/init.d/wpanet requires OpenRC; however, there's a messier but
functionally roughly equivalent version in sbin/wpanet, autogenerated from
it by means of a partial OpenRC compatability library.
This version is lacking the LSB initscript headers, but should be usable
via the standard sysv-rc interface (/etc/init.d/wpanet start/stop/...).

For a "pocket Linux", I'd suggest ditching the init scripts and adding
the relevant stuff to your rc script.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham