On Tue, 9 Jul 2013, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Is there a good Debian package for managing Wifi access? Adding an entry to /etc/network/interfaces is OK if you only have one ESSID. But if you are going to connect to one of several phones, a home Wifi, McDonalds, and others then it becomes tiring to edit that file.
I'd like something that allows a laptop to do the same things as an Android phone. To just automatically connect to a Wifi network that's in range. Ideally it would do it whenever there's no link on the Ethernet port.
In order of preference[0], wicd, wifi-radar, network-manager.
[0] not mine -- I mostly have predictable ESSIDs, so I do <http://cyber.com.au/~twb/snarf/wifi.txt>. But it seems to be the preference order of everybody I talk to about it.
Where's wpa-roam-default-iface documented? My google fue is failing me today.
I actually had to add a café AP the other day, so I just did
wpa_cli scan # wait a bit wpa_cli scan_results # look for an open AP # add it to list with key_mgmt=NONE
I haven't bothered to sort out something that's smart enough to toggle wifi on and off when the ethernet loses sync, but that OUGHT to be a matter of hooking into the eth0 post-up/down in network(5)
I use bonding with eth0 (sometimes eth1 too if I have a gigabit pci-express card in my laptop, which is prone to having a more brittle connection both physically and kernel module wise). I can't claim it to be reliable and less trouble than it's worth though. Just occasionally, specific machines on the network can't talk to other specific machines on the network when they're all set up to bond between wired and wireless. So the new laptop hasn't been set up yet and probably won't ever be... This should all just be automatic, and not require any gooeys, especially nothing depending on a size 3 grey bearded Gnome. Computers are wonderful at doing automatic things automatically. But instead, gooey network designers think it's acceptable to just add a second IP address in an ad-hoc fashion, and when it drops off, all your open ssh connections drop out instead of failing over to the other available interfaces. -- Tim Connors