Arch Linux

Profjim

Member

From: NYC

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 658

Re: information regarding wpa_supplicant and netcfg v2

That isn't too hard to do, but I think it requires editing the scripts. The basic idea is have your wpa_supplicant.conf file declare the ctrl_interface_group as "network" rather than "root". (Or "wheel", it doesn't matter.) Then make sure your users belong to that group ("usermod -a -G network myusername"). Make sure the wpa_supplicant.conf files are group-readable (I'd make them group-writable too, to make tinkering with them easier.) If you're relying on netcfg to auto-generate the wpa_supplicant.conf files (SECURITY=wpa), then you'd have to make these changes inside /usr/lib/network/wireless.subr. If you're using your own wpa_supplicant.conf file (SECURITY=wpa-config), then you could just make the changes to your own file. I know that the netcfg2 binary checks to see if it's being called by root; I don't remember if the netcfg-auto-wireless binary does too. If so, you'd have to edit that to let it be run by any member of the relevant group.

It puzzles me that netcfg-auto-wireless should work fine for you but netcfg2 not. Some of the preparatory stuff differs, but once netcfg-auto-wireless has decided which profile to try to load, it calls exactly the same functions (in /usr/lib/network/{network,wireless}.subr) as netcfg2 calls.