wpa_supplicant -u ?

[Alastair Johnson]

Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El día Monday, October 13, 2008 a las 09:22:28AM -0400, Stefan Monnier escribió:
> 
>> I'm having trouble getting wifi to work:
>> I have created a wpa_supplicant.conf file (copied from some other
>> machine), and have added "wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf"
>> to /etc/network/interfaces.
>>
>> Then `ifup eth0' sometimes works, but usually only right after boot.
>> The problem seems to be different from the "wifi only works once"
>> problem described in the wiki, because the symptom is only that
>> wpa_supplicant fails to associate (it keeps trying to associate, but to
>> no avail).
>>
>> The one odd thing I notice, is that I always get 2 wpa processes
>> running: one "wpa_supplicant -u" and one with the usual list of
>> arguments specifying the interface, conf file, etc...
>>
>> What's this "wpa_supplicant -u" doing here and who starts it?
> 
>   -u = enable DBus control interface
> 
> see 'wpa_supplicant -h';

To answer the other part of the question, I think this is started by 
connman which is used by the settings GUI to control the network 
interfaces. Connman aims to be a lightweight version of NetworkManager 
but is currently rather incomplete.

>> Also, it seems that the om2008.9's Wifi GUI (in the Settings section)
>> doesn't use ifup/ifdown (e.g. it starts up a "wpa_supplicant -u" only).
>> That's too bad.  Is there some way to get them to cooperate better?
> 
> Try my 'procedure' in http://www.unixarea.de/openmoko.txt
> and see if this helps you too; my Wifi comes up in 99 of 100 cases;

An interesting combination of methods to kill the competing instances of 
  things from connman, sort the routing issue if usb0 is up, and 
convince the wifi driver/firmware to behave itself.