Netcfg v2.5.2 - note: change in auto wireless config

Question

This release brings a completely new auto wireless/wired configuration. The old net-auto is deprecated and no longer included. There are also some very minor configuration changes that may affect a few people.
Move to new auto-wireless/wired
The new automatic connection has proper roaming support and will prove more reliable than the old setup - particularly with more complicated wireless configurations. To migrate to the new automatic wireless setup:
1. pacman -S core/wpa_actiond
2. Set WIRELESS_INTERFACE="" to your wireless interface in /etc/rc.conf.
For example WIRELESS_INTERFACE="wlan0"
3. Add net-auto-wireless to your DAEMONS=() array.
Note: wpa-config profiles do not work with this, convert them to wpa-configsection profiles. An example is included in
/etc/network.d/examples/
The new auto-wired uses similar configuration - follow the above instructions except use the net-auto-wired daemon, and WIRED_INTERFACE configuration option.
New features:
- net-auto-wireless/wpa_actiond - Real wireless roaming/auto connection. Based on same principle as autowifi. Requires optional dependency: wpa_actiond
- net-auto-wired - automatic ethernet configuration. Requires optional dependency: ifplugd
- Interface configurations - set options for all profiles using an interface
- Output hooks
- Internal cleanup & improvement
Internal changes:
- Uses wpa_supplicant for all wireless configuration by default, including wep/none security. This adds improves support for most and should improve reliability.
  - Uses iproute by default for all static configuration. net_tools which contains ifconfig is effectively obsolete and hasnt seen a release for over 8 years. The 'ethernet-iproute' and 'ethernet' connection types have been merged together to simply 'ethernet'. All options are still supported and existing configurations will continue to work for both types. A symlink has been made to ensure that profiles using 'ethernet-iproute' will continue to function.
Changes in configuration syntax
- net-auto and AUTO_NETWORKS is now deprecated in favour of net-auto-wireless/net-auto-wired.
- wireless: If you were previously specifying the wpa_supplicant driver in WPA_OPTS, you now need to specify it in WPA_DRIVER.
- wireless: iwconfig based configuration for wep/none can be used by changing to wep-old or none-old. This should not be necessary and is left in place only for the possibility of very old drivers that do not
support wpa_supplicant.
- ethernet-iproute: As 'ethernet' is now iproute based, those using 'ethernet-iproute' can revert the name. There is a symlink in place, so existing configurations of either name will continue to function
regardless.
- wireless-dbus: Unsupported. The wpa_supplicant dbus interface isn't particularly well documented and it doesn't fit well into the netcfg codebase. There is a symlink in place so that configurations using wireless-dbus will continue to function using the 'wireless' connection scripts.
Download:
netcfg 2.5.2 is in [core].
Source: ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/other/netcfg/ne … 5.2.tar.gz
PKGBUILD: In subversion
Documentation:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_Profiles
Contributors:
I had a few big contributors to this release:
Jim Pryor: Many internal changes and improvements
Thomas Bächler: wpa_actiond based auto roaming/connection
Thanks guys!
Future Plans:
* Complete non-Arch support
* Redo rfkill using the 'rfkill' tool in the repos
* Fix bugs
Bugs:
On the bug tracker as always.
Last edited by iphitus (2010-02-18 11:22:41)

Answer 1

I continued to have difficulty connecting to my default wireless network, but I eventually figured out why.  I seem to recall netcfg used to not care if a POSTUP command failed.  I read somewhere that now it does.
So once I got that taken care of, I experimented with net-auto-wireless.  It fails for me with no error message.
Being a bit of a tinkerer, I looked into the net-auto-wireless script.  I found this line...
/usr/bin/netcfg-wpa_actiond "${WIRELESS_INTERFACE}" >/dev/null
...Removed the >/dev/null, and ran it again.
$ sudo /etc/rc.d/net-auto-wireless start
:: Starting netcfg auto-wireless mode for interface wlan0 [BUSY]
eth-xover
eth-hc
wifi-home
wifi-rounds
wifi-rollingst
wifi-kevin
eth-dhcp
Line 12: WPA-PSK accepted for key management, but no PSK configured.
Line 12: failed to parse network block.
Line 22: WPA-PSK accepted for key management, but no PSK configured.
Line 22: failed to parse network block.
Failed to read or parse configuration '/tmp/wpa.wlan0/wpa.conf'.
[FAIL]
...And now that I think about it,  I bet it's because I didn't set security="none" in the open network profiles.
...Yep, that was it.
Last edited by aaaantoine (2010-02-21 01:03:02)