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Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored?

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On 12/06/2016 09:26 PM, Brian wrote:
> On Tue 06 Dec 2016 at 11:14:56 +0100, Christian Seiler wrote:
> 
>> 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.)
> 
> Direct interaction with the supplicant is not easy?

If you want to dynamically connect to a network that's not in
your wpa_supplicant.conf, then yes, that's not easy to do via
wpa_cli. (It's doable, just not easy or user-friendly.) If
you then want to combine a dynamically-added configuration
with something like DHCP, then it's even worse.

Of course, if you edit the wpa_supplicant.conf every time you
want to connect to a new network, and tear down and restart
the entire wifi interface, sure, that'll work, but it doesn't
fit well into the WiFi model.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Regards,
Christian

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Thread

Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Robert Latest <boblatest@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 09:10 +0100
  Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> - 2016-12-06 11:10 +0100
  Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Yvan Masson <yvan.masson@openmailbox.org> - 2016-12-06 11:20 +0100
    Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 20:00 +0100
      Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-12-06 20:20 +0100
      Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> - 2016-12-06 20:30 +0100
      Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Liam O'Toole <liam.p.otoole@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 20:50 +0100
  Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de> - 2016-12-06 11:20 +0100
    Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Robert Latest <boblatest@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 17:10 +0100
    Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-12-06 21:30 +0100
      Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de> - 2016-12-06 23:20 +0100
        Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-12-07 18:30 +0100
  Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Mart van de Wege <mvdwege@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 12:50 +0100
  Re: Where are WiFi passwords (WPA keys) stored? Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> - 2016-12-06 20:00 +0100

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