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Re: networking a real dog's breakfast

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William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:
> On 2018-08-28, Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> wrote:
>> William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:
>>> Networking on Linux seems to be a bit of a mess. 
>>> 
>>> wpa_supplicant just randomly connects with an access point, ignoring all
>>> suggestions as to what it should connect to. Thus, if you have (like me)
>>> a /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file, it will just randomly choose one of
>>> them to connect to, if it is available. 
>>> 
>>> It will also just connect to the a given SSID in random order, rather
>>> than connecting to say the BSSID with the strongest signal available (
>>> as would be sensible) Thus it will connect to a flakey 30% signal
>>> strength BSSID rather than a 90% signal strength BSSID with the same
>>> SSID.
>>> 
>>> iwlist craps out if there are too many BSSID available. When I am at
>>> airports, it is impossible to use the Network Center on Mageia, since it
>>> uses iwlist, and airports often have "too many" access points for iwlist
>>> (iw will list them, but it has a totally lunatic output format, and
>>> gives huge warnings that you should not screen scrape it-- and it has,
>>> as far as I can see, no other output.) Also iw seems not to work at all
>>> half the time, or if you happen to be connected to an access point, it
>>> will only give that one AP, when there another 50 available that it does
>>> not list. 
>>> wpa_cli MUST have wpa_supplicant running when it tries to do anything. 
>>> 
>>> And all of them have woefully inadequate documentation, and ancient
>>> documentation. ( for example, wpa_supplicant documentation does not mention
>>> nl80211 driver, when that is now the strongly approved driver, all
>>> others being deprecated. )
>>
>> Use networkmanager it will control wpa-supplicant & internally it uses
>> the nl80211 interface. Wicd on the other hand, calls iwlist internally
>> so in your case it'd be problematic.
>>
>> You also will need nm-applet to convienently set up each network.
> 
> I did try the network manager about 3 years ago for a while, and found
> it frustrating. When it worked it was fine. When it did not it was very
> hard to debug or to figure out how to fix it. network center (on Mageia)
> is much more configurable, but the person who wrote it is long gone, and
> the others seem to be leary/uncomforable at tackling it. It is not a
> well documented code at all (in perl), and is somewhat obscure. I think
> it eventually uses the ifup scripts to do the actual connecting. One
> problem is that wpa_supplicant itself is weird. For example it does not
> connect to the strongest signal for an SSID, but goes through trying the
> first one that reported, then if that does not work, the next, etc. Thus
> with one AP having strength 95% and another with 44%, it is as likely as
> not to connect to the weaker one, making the connection very flakey.

You might experiment with NM again, it's under continual development
and there are significant changes between versions. One problem that I
have with NM is that it's typical GNOME -- it assumes that its way of
doing things is what everyone wants.  I want dnsmasq to be a caching
nameserver, and don't care about "split dns for vpn", so I use a
wrapper script to ignore most of the args NM passes to dnsmasq so I
can use it the way I want. 

Wicd is simpler, but again uses iwlist internally and doesn't seem to
have a large developer base. NM also connects faster than wicd,
probably related to using nl80211 directly rather than parsing iwlist
output.

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networking a real dog's breakfast William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> - 2018-08-20 19:34 +0000
  Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> - 2018-08-20 20:12 +0000
    Re: networking a real dog's breakfast William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> - 2018-08-20 20:59 +0000
    Re: networking a real dog's breakfast tom <tom@0.0.0.0> - 2018-08-27 21:19 -0700
      Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net> - 2018-08-28 11:29 +0000
        Re: networking a real dog's breakfast tom <tom@0.0.0.0> - 2018-11-25 18:43 -0800
      Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Allodoxaphobia <knock_yourself_out@example.net> - 2018-08-28 13:31 +0000
  Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2018-08-28 20:10 +0000
    Re: networking a real dog's breakfast William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> - 2018-08-28 20:49 +0000
      Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2018-08-29 20:21 +0000
        Re: networking a real dog's breakfast William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> - 2018-08-29 23:29 +0000
          Re: networking a real dog's breakfast Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2018-08-30 20:19 +0000

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