Does wpa_supplicant have to be started per default? My machine has no wireless and does not need wpa_supplicant in every other way. Is the solution to deinstall wpa_supplicant?
wpa_supplicant as a service shouldn't be turned on by default. NetworkManager will start it on-demand when required. The init.d file also doesn't seem to start it by default. Note that wpa_supplicant is a generic 802.1x supplicant, and thus it's also useful if you ever connect to a wired 802.1x network as well. Perhaps it's misnamed :) Can you check your 'chkconfig --list' and see what runlevels it's marked 'on' for you?
Seems to be started by NetworkManager... $ chkconfig --list wpa_supplicant wpa_supplicant 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off $ ps ax|fgrep wpa 2446 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -u -f /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log $ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. $ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 # Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=none HWADDR=52:54:00:12:34:fb ONBOOT=yes IPADDR=192.168.122.100 SEARCH=home NETMASK=255.255.255.0 GATEWAY=192.168.122.1 TYPE=Ethernet DNS1=192.168.122.1 USERCTL=no PEERDNS=yes IPV6INIT=no NM_CONTROLLED=yes
Ok, so it's getting started on demand by NM. The supplicant can also be used to connect to 802.1x *wired* networks, which many large corporations use. Thus, it's used for wired connections too. I'm not sure this is a problem; we need to handle most of the use-cases, and we can't really have a dialog saying "oh, you just created a new 802.1x wired network in the connection editor, would you like to install wpa_supplicant to support it?" since if you need 802.1x to connect, you can't download it until you're connected... If you can think of a good solution feel free to re-open this bug and re-assign to NetworkManager. But again, it's the same reason we require PPP to be installed, because at any time you could try to use a PPPoE connection, or plug in a 3G card. Sort of like how we include all kernel drivers even though your system may not have that hardware....
It's not a question if it is installed.. it is the question, if it has to be started, though it is not needed, because I don't have a 802.1x wired network which would need it.
fair enough; the code isn't structured to allow that right now, but theoretically could be.
So it turns out that with the supplicant started, we can actually autodetect 802.1x and select appropriate wired connections automatically! So I think the forward path here is to only start the supplicant for wired connections where there are 802.1x connections defined in your config. Further optimization might be able to stop the supplicant when the current connection is not wired 802.1x, and re-start it when that connection drops.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 11 development cycle. Changing version to '11'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
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Fedora 12 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2010-12-02. Fedora 12 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.