On Sun, Aug 04, 2013 at 12:07:29PM +0200, Mirco Richter wrote: > Is there some GUI-front-end for (at least) the wlan related functionality of > ifconfig? > > (No need to argue here, about the flexability of ifconfig and the > restrictions of > any GUI-approach) > > The point is, that using OBSD as a workstation on a laptop, requires a lot of > authentification at different WPA/WEP encrypted wlan networks, some with PSK, > some in enterprise mode and whoknowswhatelse ... > > Doing this on the terminal is simply a waste of time and it would be rational > to have a GUI for at least this subset of the full ifconfig functionality. > > Does anyone know of an approach here? For now dependencies like GTK || qt > doesn't matter.... > > /mirco
I've looked into porting network manager and wcid some time back. It's horrid. They both rely on Linux-specific features like udev so it's not trivial to port them. Also, not everyone running OpenBSD will be willing to trust these tools. I think it would be better to spend time on making the kernel join known encrypted wireless networks just like it joins non-encrypted ones. After all, the real issue lies with configuring the link layer. As soon as there is a link people can use DHCP/autoconf as usual. So you would have hostname.if files such as: nwid mynet wpakey mysecretkey nwid some-other-net nwkey wepkey -nwid The last line switches back to "any essid" mode, and the interface would now join any of the listed networks within range, even if encrypted. Or it could be forced to a particular network without requiring the password again, e.g. 'ifconfig ral0 nwid mynet'. Right now the kernel discards the previously used key when a new key is set. So this would require a password cache in the kernel, which would have to be limited in size. But in practice that should be enough to automatically connect to a set of commonly used networks. I've got a rough start of a proof-of-concept patch for this but there are some bugs I need to figure out before sharing my patch becomes useful. If you'd like to help hacking on it please let me know. Perhaps the idea is stupid and won't really work as I imagine it. But I believe it's worth trying, I also find it annoying to manually configure wireless all the time. WPA enterprise is another story because keys aren't known in advance. But it's not supported out of the box in the base system anyway right now.
