[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#458125: network-manager offers only WEP encryption, no WPA

[David Madore]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 09:50:03PM +0100, David Madore wrote:
> The wireless configuration window for network-manager only offers the
> choice between "WEP key (hexadecimal)" and "WEP key (ascii)": no WPA
> here.  Yet wpa_supplicant, when invoked manually (whether with -Dwext
> or -Dmadwifi, see below for card model) works perfectly, and enables
> WPA as it should.  Why is network-manager unaware of this?

I should probably add the following piece of information: the output
of "iwlist ath0 auth" is as follows:

ath0      Authentication capabilities :
		WPA
		WPA2
		CIPHER-TKIP
		CIPHER-CCMP
          Current WPA version :
		WPA2
          Current Key management :
		PSK
          Current Pairwise cipher :
		CCMP
          Current Pairwise cipher :
		CCMP
          Current TKIP countermeasures : no
          Current Drop unencrypted : yes
          Current Roaming control : no
          Current Privacy invoked : yes

So iwlist from wireless-tools 29~pre22-1 (and libiw, which is the same
version and compiled from the same source) knows that WPA and WPA2 are
supported.  I can't imagine why network-manager doesn't pick up on
this.  This makes the following all the truer:

> Whatever the reason, I think it would be wise to add a checkbox
> somewhere in the network manager config to the effect of "force trying
> to use WPA/WPA2, even if we believe wpa_supplicant can't do it on this
> card" (or something): sometimes the user knows better than the
> software!

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (david.madore at ens.fr,
     http://www.madore.org/~david/ )