[COLUG] Auto-attaching to arbitrary wireless networks

[Rob Funk]

Rob Funk wrote:
> So, is there an easier way to arbitrarily detect and connect to random
> wireless networks with these various interfaces?  No points for a
> half-GUI, half-command-line solution, since that's worse than the
> all-command-line solution I use now.

I forgot another limitation: it must be available in the Debian/Ubuntu 
software repositories.  If Debian sees fit to include it, then there's 
some level of quality assurance there, as well as updatability.
And since I'm using KDE and not Gnome, nm-applet isn't an option for me, 
though it may be a good answer to the general problem.

So I started doing some apt-cache searching.
  apt-cache search wireless | grep -i kde

First thing I came up with was wlassistant.  That requires running 
entirely under sudo, and because of the theme difference it made me think 
I was using a Gnome app.  I'm not real fond of GUI apps running entirely 
under sudo, for multiple reasons.  It did scan and detect my network, and 
let me bring up the interface to it right away, from the scan window.  
Basically I think it does what I want, but does too much as root.

Next up is kwlan, which at first seemed to have worse permission problems, 
since it seemed to have difficulty scanning at first.  Eventually I got 
that working, though I'm not sure what changed.  It takes the 
network-manager approach of remembering a list of networks to connect to.  
Then it has a scan window where networks can be detected and added to the 
initial list.  Not bad, but a little cumbersome for my taste.  (It also 
handles dialup networks if you're into that.)

Finally we have kwifimanager.  It doesn't require running under sudo for 
normal use, though it does use sudo as necessary (including 
configuration).  It scans and finds my network.  It lets me select the 
network to use.  It also has a cool "acoustic scanning" feature that uses 
beeps to indicate signal strength (for moving around to pick up the 
signal better).  However, bringing up the network interface isn't quite 
as nice as I'd like; it requires some extra configuration, and the most 
common case (DHCP) requires typing "/sbin/dhclient" into a dialog box.  
(Figuring that out was not obvious.)  Switching over to the generic KDE 
Network Manager may help (or not).  Both allow multiple saved network 
configurations, so maybe I can stop the card swapping.

(Also, unlike the other two, kwifimanager doesn't have WPA support, but I 
figure that SSL and VPNs are a better solution anyway.)

So all three are getting close, and the choice between them seems to be 
about how much code runs as root, how convenient it is to see what's 
detected, how convenient it is to bring up the network interface after 
the network is detected, and how important WPA is.  If not for the 
all-root part I'd go with wlassistant without hesitation, and 
kwifimanager is also nice on the wireless aspect if not the network 
aspect.


-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"