Hi Christian (and everybody else), thanks for all the helpful answers. NetworkManager was what I was looking for. I was just not aware of any additional layer on top of wpa-supplicant.
robert On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 11:14 AM, Christian Seiler <christ...@iwakd.de> wrote: > On 12/06/2016 09:04 AM, Robert Latest wrote: >> Not in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, despite suggestions in >> every bit of documentation that I got my hands on. In fact, that file >> doesn't even exist on my jessie system. Nevertheless, when I >> configured the WiFi network using some GUI tool in the XFCE desktop, >> it worked. > > Disclaimer: I'm not a user of XFCE, so if that does something > really weird, this may not apply. > > However, most graphical tools interface with NetworkManager, and > that stores its configuration in /etc/NetworkManager. > > You'll likely find your password stored in > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/$SSID > (file only readable/writable as root; also please don't modify it > while NetworkManager is running, it will overwrite it without > warning; modifying it when NetworkManager is stopped is fine > though) > > where you replace $SSID with the SSID of your WiFi. > > On some desktops (e.g. GNOME) the Password can be stored in the > personal user's keyring/wallet/password manager instead, but > then you need to be logged in for NetworkManager to have access > to the password - which is not true in your case because you > mentioned: > >> Even after a reboot, with no desktop running, I could ssh >> into the system via WiFi. > > So that means that NetworkManager has the password stored > directly. > > Note that when using NetworkManager, it configures its own > instance of wpa_supplicant, so you should never touch a > configuration file for wpa_supplicant yourself in this kind of > setup. > > (You could of course stop using NetworkManager and configure > wpa_supplicant manually, but I really wouldn't recommend that; > I don't think wpa_supplicant is designed in a way that makes > direct end-user usage easy - there's a reason why NetworkManager > exists instead of desktop environments communicating directly > with wpa_supplicant.) > >> BTW, I did find a wpa_supplicant.conf file in some deep subdir of >> /etc/dbus-1/... > > That's just the DBus policy, that doesn't configure how > wpa_supplicant reacts, but only how the DBus daemon handles > the access policy for wpa_supplicant. (DBus is a communication > bus used on Linux and other systems; most desktop envirnoments, > including XFCE, use it internally for some things.) Unless you > know what you're doing, I wouldn't touch that, otherwise you > could end up stopping NetworkManager from communicating with > wpa_supplicant and then your WiFi could stop working altogether. > > Regards, > Christian
