wpa_supplicant gets points for trying, I suppose....

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Bernhard Schmidt <bschmidt at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 16:53, David Wolfskill <david at catwhisker.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 08:40:54AM +0100, Bernhard Schmidt wrote:
>>> ....
>>> > > I have the switch on this laptop in position to disable the wireless
>>> > > device (iwn(4)).  Is there some way wpa_supplicant (or something) might
>>> > > be able to recognize that this is a pointless exercise?
>>> >
>>> > Well iwn could bring device down when radio is turned off and
>>> > bring it up when radio is turned on ???
>>>
>>> Well, that should actually be the case. I don't see how it might differ
>>> between stable/8 and head.
>>>
>>> Can you post the output of
>>> wpa_supplicant -Dbsd -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -d
>>> while the RF kill button is in disabled state?
>>>
>>> > > I don't recall stable/8 doing this, though I could be wrong.
>>
>> Next time I booted stable/8, I checked /var/log/messages, and verified
>> that wpa_supplicant is also persistent in that environment.
>>
>> So I did the above within script(1); I've attached a copy of the
>> typescript file.  This was done while running:
>>
>> FreeBSD 8.1-STABLE #20 r214672: Tue Nov  2 04:19:13 PDT 2010
>
> Thanks. I had quick look into that and I currently do not see an easy
> way to address that issue, as in tell wpa_supplicant about the device's
> state. This might change though once a newer wpa_supplicant has been
> imported.
>
> For now just add wpa_supplicant_flags="-qqqq" to rc.conf.

    Device states could and should be periodically polled via the
SIOCGIFMEDIA ioctl, but currently isn't (even in the CURRENT version
of wpa_supplicant). This seems like a worthy enhancement.
Cheers,
-Garrett