On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
Hi
On Thursday 21 June 2012, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
[…]
Frank Miles wrote:
The wpa_supplicant.conf man page has many items of interest, but
lacks _where_ this file is supposed to be.
Perhaps a word or two in the DESCRIPTION section could be added to help.
DESCRIPTION
This page describes the configuration file named on the
wpa_supplicant(8) command line:
wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0
Kel et al: what do you think?
That file can be just about anywhere, as it's always specified with a
full path
wpa_supplicant.conf(5)
All file paths in this configuration file should use full (absolute, not
relative to
working directory) path in order to allow working directory to be
changed. This can
happen if wpa_supplicant is run in the background
both on cli, like you quoted, or using the ifupdown hook through /
etc/network/interface (network-manager uses DBus) instead):
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface profile_foo inet dhcp
iface also_profile_bar inet dhcp
iface work_roaming inet dhcp
iface default inet dhcp
how you call it, or where you store it, doesn't have any influence on
its functionality. For debugging, on cli, you might have something in
$HOME, /root/ might make sense for some uses, personally I like the
/e/n/i example above - and even the file name can be chosen freely.
Therefore I don't see the documentation problem here, the namespace
is completely under the authority of the local system administrator,
and I'm tempted to close this bug.
Regards
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
-----------------
The piece that I was missing was specifying the wpa_supplicant.conf file in
/etc/network/interfaces. While I'm sure that networking experts would
find this obvious, AFAICS neither the wpa_supplicant man pages, nor the
/etc/network/interfaces man page indicate this linkage. Once I found how
to specify the wpa_supplicant.conf file in the /etc/network/interfaces file
it all made much more sense and I was able to make it work.
Thanks for your concern! (Someone else posted it as a 'bug'.)
-Frank Miles
(biomedical engineer)
