WPA soon?

[Stealth]

I love this little program, it looks a lot better and is much more simple than the Kwifi I use, but unfortunately neither of em seem to have WPA capabilities...

Is there a way to check if wpa_supplicant is installed, and then allow the option to join WPA networks with this too?

[mroth]

I agree that WPA needs to be implemented for decent Wifi support. The majority of the networks I use have now moved to WPA-PSK for authentication. I suspect this will continue as even most cheapo consumer Wifi gateways now recommend WPA as the default authentication method in their documentation.

[valnar]

Welp... to add fuel to the fire, I consider WPA & certificates support at the enterprise level (EAP, PEAP, or even EAP-FAST) in addition to WPA-PSK an absolute necessity. I consider it the biggest obstacle present (yes, you read that right) in recommending Linux to any of my friends or collegues, especially running it in a business. If I were go to down the list of "items" being worked on in Breezy, I can't even find it, yet it's #1 in my book for any modern Linux distro.

Strange how we all have different priorities, huh?

Anyway, I want to thank the author of the GTKWifi project for his continued work on this application. I, for one, consider it the most important program being worked on today.... hands down.

Robert

[jomurmiranda]

I just wanted to stress the importance of WPA support and thank the developers for their work. I agree that WPA support is the biggest issue for me.

[pkoufalas]

Not sure I understand your concerns?

I've installed wpa_supplicant for WPA/WPA2 support with Hoary on my laptop; Hoary came with wireless-tools installed, but that only supports WEP and not WPA.

I'm happy to say I'm using wpa_supplicant successfully at home with my Billion ADSL wireless router, i.e. for WPA-PSK + TKIP authentication and encryption. The Billion doesn't support AES as yet. The only issue I had was with DHCP, and I'm 99% sure it was at the router wireless interface where DHCP was falling over. So I have a static interface configuration.

This particular project is mostly about a nice user interface as far as I understand it -- do you mean you've tried wpa_supplicant and have found deficiencies?

[valnar]

This particular project is mostly about a nice user interface as far as I understand it -- do you mean you've tried wpa_supplicant and have found deficiencies?

Yes, and more.

1) I need to be able to add/remove and select different WPA settings for different locations. Editing a configuration file doesn't make that easy.

2) It's very deficient in the fact I can't get PEAP with certificates working. That's our corporate standard - to say nothing of EAP-Fast, LEAP or EAP-TLC.

-Robert

[pkoufalas]

> 1) I need to be able to add/remove and select different WPA settings for different locations. Editing a configuration file doesn't make that easy.

OK. I suppose I would've hoped that entering details of the networks in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and using /etc/networks/interfaces with auto iface xxx dhcp and pre-up wpa_supplicant ... down skill wpa_supplicant was the way to have it work automatically...??? I have that setup for WPA-PSK/TKIP. I'm assuming that wpa_supplicant would try the appropriate authentication/encryption method based on the received ssid. Okay, I'm just speculating!

> 2) It's very deficient in the fact I can't get PEAP with certificates working. That's our corporate standard - to say nothing of EAP-Fast, LEAP or EAP-TLC

Fair enough. I guess it's really up to the wpa_supplicant developers to fix it, not Ubuntu breezy developers? This would impact all linux distros, including Debian, right?

[bryan986]

wpa_supplicant can be used in combination with xsupplicant to get added features, but I have yet to get it to work with my wireless, it is a lot more complicated than it should be :(

[anders.ostling]

I have, after many moons of experimenting, a configuration that uses

ifplugd
ifmetric
wpa_supplicant

Now I can freely roam between the following networks

Wired DHCP network at home
WEP-protected wlan at home
Wired DHCP network at work
WPA/LEAP authentication w dynamic WEP keys at work

ifplugd is handling the ethernet for me while the following parameters in /etc/network/interfaces handles wpa_supplicant and route metrics

-----------------

auto lo eth1
iface lo inet loopback
mapping hotplug
script grep
map eth0
map eth1

iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface eth1 inet dhcp
pre-up sh /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant start && sleep 5
post-up ifmetric eth1 5

-------------

I also had to disable automatic start of wpasupplicant

chmod 600 /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant

since I let ifup handle invocation. Note that I also have used the "ifmetric" tool to avoid problems with dual routes with same metric when both cable and wifi are present. Works like a charm.

Here is my wpa_supplicant.conf (w/o key information)

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
ap_scan=2
network={
ssid="WORKWIFI"
key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
eap=LEAP
identity="<ad-domain>\<ad-username>"
password="<ad-password>"
priority=5
}
# Shared WEP key connection (no WPA, no IEEE 802.1X)
network={
ssid="HOMEWIFI"
key_mgmt=NONE
wep_key0=51F7xxxxxxxxxxx867775AA
wep_tx_keyidx=0
priority=4
}

Note that I had to use "ap_scan=2" since our AP's at work does not broadcast their ssid's. Found that by trial-and-success...

What's lacking is some function to connect to open hot-spots. I guess I will let wifi-radar do that for me since it's not a daily task that needs to be automated anyway

Enjoy!
Anders

[dakira]

Cool.. I didn't know I could add WEP networks to wpa_supplicant.conf. This solves all my problems ;)