On Tue 06 Dec 2016 at 23:09:59 +0100, Christian Seiler wrote: > On 12/06/2016 09:26 PM, Brian wrote: > > That all said: I'm not a huge fan of NetworkManager, I think > some aspects of it are not well enough thought out to my > taste - but it does it's job in the case of WiFi, and it does > it well, better than the alternatives I've seen so far.
I've never really used NetworkManager, not because I think it is lacking in some way but because the alternatives of ifupdown, wpa_supplicant and ConnMan etc do a good job for me and my users when at home or roaming. > > However, it is worth acknowledging that Debian has the most complete > > integration of ifupdown with wpa_supplicant you will find. It also has > > excellent documentation to help with explaining this integration. There > > are some things Debian does so well that they are unsurpassable. > > Yes, and the primary use case I see for this are headless > servers or similar that are connected via WiFi, where the > connection rarely changes. I would not want to use that on a > laptop though, because you never know when you'll want to > connect to a different network. The author of the README.Debian doesn't appear to take the same view as you. I use what is in it as the basis for my roaming setup on a laptop. I've just refreshed my memory on the what needs to be done: a stanza or two in /e/n/i, a couple of lines in a wpa_supplicant.conf and an install of wpa_gui. Connecting to a different network with wpa_gui doesn't seem to be any more difficult than using any other GUI application. > > Just in case you think you > > cannot point and click when you have direct enduser control over the > > supplicant, think again. There is wpa-gui. > > Last time I tried wpa_gui troubleshooting with it was a huge > mess, and I had to resort to wpa_cli to actually get some > sensible information about what was going on. Maybe that has > improved since (it's been a couple of years), but my > experiences with it have been bad. I think any serious debugging of a wireless issue would inevitably involve wpa_cli at some point. I do agree, though, that wpa_cli as a way of end-user interaction isn't desirable in the normal course of events. Thank goodness for NetworkManager and all the other GUI stuff. -- Brian.
