wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

dying_sphynx · 2011-03-23 00:16:38

BTW, I've also copied wifi-select repository on github:

I think this might lead to more intensive patching/collaboration between developers which is definitely useful.
I'm planning to move "official" wifi-select location to github soon.

dolby · 2011-03-24 07:13:40

dying_sphynx wrote:

BTW, I've also copied wifi-select repository on github:
https://github.com/sphynx/wifi-select
I think this might lead to more intensive patching/collaboration between developers which is definitely useful.
I'm planning to move "official" wifi-select location to github soon.

Nice. Added the link to the wiki

theif519 · 2011-06-13 19:25:28

dying_sphynx wrote:

Hi all!
I'm happy to announce new 'wifi-select' tool for selecting networks "in real-time" (in NetworkManager manner). I heard on the forums there were requests for such a tool from the users of netcfg. The tool is convinient for use in wifi-cafe or another places you are visiting first (and maybe last) time. Then you don't need to create the file-profile for a new network, just type 'sudo wifi-select eth1' and choose the network you need.
The tool is currently packaged and available in AUR (yaourt -S wifi-select).
It works as follows:
- parses 'iwlist scan' and presents list of networks along with its security settings (wpa/wep/none) using 'dialog'.
- if user selects network with existing profile -- just use this profile to connect with 'netcfg'.
- if user selects a new network (for example network from wifi-cafe he currently visited), net-select automatically generates new profile with corresponding $SECURITY and asks for the key (if needed). It uses DHCP as $IP by default.
- then, if connection succeeds, profile is saved for later usage.
- if connection fails, user is asked if he/she wants to keep generated profile for further usage (for example to change $IP to static or adjust some additional options).
Parsing of 'iwlist' output is done using AWK script (this seems to be clearer than grep+sed in my case). I've put it under /usr/lib/network (where netcfg .subr-files are located).
I sent the scripts to James Rayner aka iphitus (maintainer of netcfg), he was interested and suggested to package the tool in AUR and if there would be some attention and interest -- he would package it in extra.
So, I'm waiting for your feedback and questions.
Thank you!

No, thank YOU! This new script is amazingly simple and easy to use. I thank you. It took me a LONG time to set up WiFi on this old laptop because I go from website to website trying to find solutions when they didn't work for me, that or I didn't do it right. I eventually got it from an easy solution and bit of configuration but it worked. Your method will help me use open WiFi easily. I've only used Linux for at most 4 months now, but I'm learning a lot, and it's people like you who keep the Linux Community thriving. Thank you again.

Elitist · 2011-06-18 16:03:31

Thank you for this excellent piece of software. Now I am able to use my old pcmia wireless.

skodabenz · 2011-06-21 15:33:19

Thank you so much for this script. One feature request - is it possible to add dhclient as possible option in the generated netcfg profile -

DHCLIENT="yes"

It supports DHCPv6. Thanks in advance.

Last edited by skodabenz (2011-06-21 15:33:43)

cap_sensitive · 2011-08-31 10:01:51

wifi-select is awesome!
Feature request:
Generates profiles that are formated in wpa-configsection, so that net-auto-wireless can use them without the need of manual convertion.

the sad clown · 2011-09-01 00:40:10

I agree with the others, this is simply one of the best tools for wifi I have seen. I used to use wicd, but have not felt the need for either it or network-manager since I started using wifi-select.

Japanlinux · 2011-09-01 02:54:16

Sad Clown, I also love wifi-select, but there is one thing I'm missing from things like wicd. Occassionally my wifi dies and because I use wifi-select, I don't realize this. I'd like a way to monitor the connection. Maybe conky could do that, but I've never used it so I wouldn't know how to go about that. Still, I live with that issue because wifi-select is awesome.

the sad clown · 2011-09-01 03:35:12

I do use conky (piped into dwm statusbar), so it never occurred to me to that it didn't have a way to notify you. Conky is a great tool for system notifications, not just wifi, and is easily configured. You should give it a go.

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-10 20:59:26

iphitus wrote:

Instead of parsing iwlist, wifi-select could parse the output of wpa_supplicant. There's some example code in the netcfg scripts - it uses this instead of iwconfig.
Have a look at wpa_supplicant_scan_info in /usr/lib/network/wireless, an example of how to use this is list_networks in the same file.
wpa_supplicant_scan_info takes 2 arguments, the interface, and a comma separated list of the fields to return. The values for these fields include essid, security and signal strength.

Hi iphitus!

I'm back to wifi-select development

What are the advantages of using "wpa_supplicant" over "iwlist"?

Last edited by dying_sphynx (2011-11-10 21:15:31)

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-10 21:15:18

Hi all!

I've updated the package by including a patch from GitHub user poljar. So now wifi-select uses WIRELESS_INTERFACE variable in the case interface parameter is not provided.

Please see the latest version on GitHub: https://github.com/sphynx/wifi-select

And some questions: should I mark the package out-of-date? And where should I ask for change of the upstream URL from current to github one?

I've contacted the last packager of wifi-select, but just in case I will ask here as well, because the package seems to be orphaned in [community] at the moment.

Last edited by dying_sphynx (2011-11-10 21:15:42)

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-10 21:23:41

skodabenz wrote:

Thank you so much for this script. One feature request - is it possible to add dhclient as possible option in the generated netcfg profile -
DHCLIENT="yes"
It supports DHCPv6. Thanks in advance.

In wifi-select generated profiles I would prefer to stick with the defaults used by netcfg. So since using "dhcpcd" is the default and you need to add DHCLIENT="yes" by yourself while using netcfg, I believe this behaviour should remain the same in wifi-select.

But if you want to patch your local wifi-select to make DHCLIENT="yes" default, just add

DHCLIENT="yes"

to /usr/bin/wifi-select around line 60 (in the pattern for generated profiles).

jouke · 2011-11-11 16:40:36

After opening https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/25479 I decided to have my own take on the beloved wifi-select.
It became https://github.com/joukewitteveen/wifi-menu/.
I have not yet announced it anywhere because it awaits the next release of netcfg, which incorporates a fix for https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/26036.

The differences between wifi-menu and wifi-select are small but numerous. My version integrates more tightly with netcfg and does not use awk. It also fixes a lot of small bugs regarding generality (for example: it makes less assumptions on the ESSID) and usability (help and error messages). The dependencies are only netcfg and dialog.

Last edited by jouke (2011-11-11 16:44:42)

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-13 14:28:58

jouke wrote:

After opening https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/25479 I decided to have my own take on the beloved wifi-select.
It became https://github.com/joukewitteveen/wifi-menu/.
I have not yet announced it anywhere because it awaits the next release of netcfg, which incorporates a fix for https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/26036.

That's great that people start to make something new on top of my script!

jouke wrote:

The differences between wifi-menu and wifi-select are small but numerous. My version integrates more tightly with netcfg and does not use awk. It also fixes a lot of small bugs regarding generality (for example: it makes less assumptions on the ESSID) and usability (help and error messages). The dependencies are only netcfg and dialog.

But is "not using AWK" really an advantage? I believe we may use awk without any problems if it fits the task.

"more tightly integration with netcfg" is an advantage indeed, if we can reuse something already implemented there, why not? I was thinking about reusing scanning functionality of wpa_supplicant (as netcfg does), as iphitus pointed out earlier.

Could you please elaborate on the bugs and "less assumptions on ESSID", so I can fix them in wifi-select?

And regarding help messages and errors, please feel free to ask to change them to something more meaningful or correct (I'm not an English native speaker, so might have easily made a stupid mistake somewhere in the tool messages).

All the best,
Ivan.

jouke · 2011-11-14 15:17:24

dying_sphynx wrote:

That's great that people start to make something new on top of my script!

Well, not exactly on top of your script. I rewrote it from scratch ;-).

With regard to awk, my script shows that you don't need it and can do everything cleanly in just one file. As for the other bugs, there are very many of them, mostly concerning quotation. One thing I remember is that the ESSID could also not contain an '='-sign. The verbosity is just increased in general and now uses Arch style messaging where applicable.

I can run down your script once more for bugs when I have time if you like, but the easiest way to fix all those small bugs would of course be to adopt my rewrite. It looks like I will keep using it for a while, so patches will be welcomed. Added to that I think the source is quite understandable. When you read it you will find that the logic differs in details from that of wifi-select.

Such a shame that netcfg development doesn't appear to be very active.

Regards,
- Jouke

rogue · 2011-11-19 06:07:40

This is really great for when I'm on the go. Thanks for your work on this dying_sphynx!

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-19 13:12:13

I have fixed several quoting problems mentioned by jouke, now it's possible to use '=', ':', leading spaces and other weird characters in ESSIDs and still be able to use wifi-select for choosing them! Note that '\t' (tab character) still won't work, but using tabs in ESSID names should be punished anyway

Another minor improvement is showing asterisks during password prompt, that makes it friendlier.

All the fixes are available on Github:
https://github.com/sphynx/wifi-select

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-19 13:20:53

Also, as someone requested here, sometimes it would be even more convenient to see the characters you type in the password instead of asterisks (assuming no one can see what you type at the moment). To allow this, it would make sense to provide some flag in command line, e.g.

wifi-select --show-pass

Another option is to introduce a configuration file for wifi-select (say ~/.wifi-select), where you can specify some flags and possibly a template file for automatically generated netcfg profiles.

What do you think about this? Will this be of any use?

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-19 17:28:18

OK, I made that option for showing passwords anyway Also, lots of small usability improvements based on jouke's code from wifi-menu.

As usual, the latest code may be found on GitHub.

It's a pity that the package is orphaned in [community] at the moment, makes a little bit more complicated to promote changes from GitHub to Arch repos.

Haptic · 2011-11-21 03:48:27

Can you have the passwords hashed or leave an option for them to be? I don't like passwords in plain text.

dying_sphynx · 2011-11-22 20:45:19

Haptic wrote:

Can you have the passwords hashed or leave an option for them to be? I don't like passwords in plain text.

This issue is not related to wifi-select, it just creates the profiles in the format which can be read by netcfg.

In ArchWiki/netcfg https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netcfg we can read the following:

Note: Network information (e.g. wireless passkey) will be stored in plain text format, so users may want to change the permissions on the newly created profile (e.g. chmod 0600 /etc/network.d/mynetwork to make it readable by root only).

wifi-select does chmod 0600 for generated profiles (at least in the latest version), that's the only thing I can do with respect to this issue.

Hope this clarifies the situation for you.

el mariachi · 2011-11-26 08:48:47

cap_sensitive wrote:

wifi-select is awesome!
Feature request:
Generates profiles that are formated in wpa-configsection, so that net-auto-wireless can use them without the need of manual convertion.

I strongly second this! I've tried doing it by hand and never got it to work

archman-cro · 2012-02-05 20:02:02

Thank you for this magnificent program!

Unia · 2012-02-05 20:13:28

archman-cro wrote:

Thank you for this magnificent program!

+1!

dying_sphynx · 2012-02-19 00:08:11

Regarding plain text passwords in netcfg profiles: thanks to Chris Borrell who turned my attention to the fact that we can have hexadecimal keys in netcfg configs now!

So, now we have a new wifi-select option: "-x" or "--pass-in-hex". When this option is on (by default it's off), WPA passwords will be saved in profiles as hex strings produced by wpa_passphrase.

More details here, in the third note:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne … figuration

The new option is available on GitHub. Be aware that this adds a new dependency: wpa_supplicant (although most users should have it installed if they use wifi .

Arch Linux

#101 2011-03-23 00:16:38

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#102 2011-03-24 07:13:40

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#103 2011-06-13 19:25:28

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#104 2011-06-18 16:03:31

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#105 2011-06-21 15:33:19

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#106 2011-08-31 10:01:51

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#107 2011-09-01 00:40:10

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#108 2011-09-01 02:54:16

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#109 2011-09-01 03:35:12

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#110 2011-11-10 20:59:26

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#111 2011-11-10 21:15:18

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#112 2011-11-10 21:23:41

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#113 2011-11-11 16:40:36

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#114 2011-11-13 14:28:58

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#115 2011-11-14 15:17:24

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#116 2011-11-19 06:07:40

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#117 2011-11-19 13:12:13

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#118 2011-11-19 13:20:53

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#119 2011-11-19 17:28:18

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#120 2011-11-21 03:48:27

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#121 2011-11-22 20:45:19

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#122 2011-11-26 08:48:47

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#123 2012-02-05 20:02:02

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#124 2012-02-05 20:13:28

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

#125 2012-02-19 00:08:11

Re: wifi-select: for selecting wifi network from console (based on netcfg)

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