[arch-dev-public] [networking] autowifi

[James Rayner]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 12:12:24PM +0200, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> With my new laptop and working wireless, I am now able to announce the
> "autowifi" scripts I wrote a few weeks ago.
> 
> Requirements:
> - wpa_supplicant
> - wifi driver that is supported by wpa_supplicant
> - dhclient
> 
> Features:
> - Automatically select the best network (done by wpa_supplicant) and
> configure it according to configuration files (done by autowifi)
> - wifi configuration via wpa_supplicant.conf
> - dhcp,static or "custom" network configuration via /etc/autowifi/networks/
> - default configuration for unknown networks (if a network is not
> configured, the default behaviour is using dhcp)
> - same configuration for networks whose essid matches a regex
> - once configured, it works completely without user interaction, but it
> _can_ be controlled by wpa_gui (or any other wpa_supplicant client), so
> that you can access networks without changing wpa_supplicant.conf.
> 
> I am still unsure whether and how this can be integrated into James'
> netcfg, that's a question that I'd rather let him answer.
> 
> That said, autowifi is VERY simple. It doesn't reinvent the wheel by
> using wpa_supplicant for selecting networks - parsing iwlist outputs
> doesn't work very well, does it? As all wifi drivers will be moved to
> mac80211 in the near future, wpa_supplicant-support will not be a
> restriction anymore.
> 
> I tested it on iwl3945 and rt2x00-git. The latter has problems scanning
> and shows very few networks, therefore didn't work very well. I couldn't
> test it with iwl3945 in an environment with many wireless networks yet,
> but I trust it works better.
> 
> HOWTO:
> - Install the package from
> http://www.archlinux.org/~thomas/autowifi-svn/ or from svn at
> http://projects.archlinux.org/svn/autowifi/
> - Create /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and configure all your networks (you
> can configure anything here, open, WEP, WPA-PSK, WPA-EAP and so on).
> - Read /etc/autowifi/regex and map ESSIDs to profile names if necessary.
> - Read /etc/autowifi/networks/example and configure
> /etc/autowifi/networks/default and /etc/autowifi/networks/profilename if
> necessary. If you only use dhcp on all networks, no configuration is
> necessary here.
> - Adjust the interface and config file name in /etc/conf.d/autowifi
> properly.
> - /etc/rc.d/autowifi start (can of course be done via rc.conf)
> 
> Possible bugs: In my first test, dhcp wouldn't work when I changed
> networks, maybe I need to delete the dhclient lease file.
> 
> Any feedback is welcome
> Thomas

could tie in very nicely to mine if it used the same network profile
configuration, otherwise it's a bit icky, having wireless networks
defined in multiple locations. Part of the point of my scripts was to
eliminate that.