From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020712 Description of problem: There doesn't appear to be an obvious place to put wireless configuration information (such as ESSID, mode, keys, etc). This used to be in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts, with a useful if perhaps cryptic method to determine which card is in use, and make the right settings. ifup-wireless (part of initscripts) has the right code to use iwconfig in order to set the values, but I don't see an obvious place that this information can be set. There's no machine specific file that's used to provide this sort of info. Nor have I found any GUIsh tools for supporting this information. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see ifup-wireless 2. look for a place to set ESSID or KEY 3. Additional info: I added a small chunk of code to ifup-wireless that should look familiar. [ -f /etc/sysconfig/wireless ] && . /etc/sysconfig/wireless Now I can do whatever I need in a shell script to set the parameters that need setting. I do miss this being part of the pcmcia settings, since I use a scheme where if it's in the bottom slot, I use the values for home and in the top pc card slot, I use the values for work. There should be a good way to manage multiple wireless profiles, ideally based on information already obtained (like ESSID perhaps, or MAC address of the AP). I've hacked something within /etc/sysconfig/wireless to check which slot I'm in via /var/lib/pcmcia/stab, which is really ugly but it works. I couldn't do this unless I made the requested change to ifup-wireless however.
Created attachment 68666 [details] My /etc/sysconfig/wireless example
This is done in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<whatever>
I think this is a serious regression in functionality. Under the older system (7.[0123]), I had a mechanism that was independent of what the actual interface name was, as it was based on the card type (in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts or whatever the exact file name was). The fact that ifup-wireless is a separate piece from the remainder of the ifup- mechanisms is a clear sign that its possible for a wireless card to be on any interface and separated from some of the basic networking infrastructure. I like the idea that this networking info is in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts now. The problem now is that my wireless interface changes from time to time, because sometimes I'm using a wired connection at the same time. If ifup-wireless would be interface independent by moving the wireless config info out of ifcfg-*, I could easily be running with or without additional interfaces, regardless of the order that I installed the network cards into this machine. Now if there were a simple non-code file to edit to place these wireless config parameters into, I'd be interface independent.
This is probably best done by changing the association to something other than ethX device names; this is a non-trivial change.
*** Bug 75293 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***