[Sugar-devel] Passphrase must be re-entered when XO loses then regains wifi connection

[Sascha Silbe]

Ajay Garg <ajaygargnsit at gmail.com> writes:

> NM may (re-)request the secrets in the following cases ::
>
> a)
> Wifi connection is lost. (Yes, even if the AP is switched off permanently,
> the dialog-box keeps popping up periodically).
>
> b)
> After being lost, the wifi connection is again within the range.
>
> c)
> When the credentials for the wifi network change.
>
>
> Supposedly, for every case, the "request_new" parameter in "GetSecrets"
> method is True.

Have you verified this theory?


> Ideally, "request_new" should be True, only for case c).

Yes. If it doesn't, that's an NM bug, not a Sugar one. We know NM is
deficient in that area (see my reply [1] on the NM list), but that's
something to fix in NM, not in Sugar.


> However, case c) is rare (and when it does happen, usually the
> system-administrator, or the like,
> has the responsibility for issuing the changes publically).

The problem is that Sugar doesn't provide a way to change or remove
credentials for a single AP. You can only remove _all_ credentials. So
if we add a workaround (which may be a reasonable thing to do until NM
gets fixed), a single AP with changed credentials (and as someone
pointed out on a related thread, that may happen regularly in some
environments) would force the user to either re-acquire and re-enter all
other credentials or use some non-Sugar tool to remove the
connection. That may be fine for some of our users, but not all of them.

So if we're inclined to use the workaround while waiting for NM to get
fixed, I'd recommend to pick up the design discussion [2,3] about our
NetworkManager client UI again, especially about a way to remove
credentials for a single connection [4,5]. We even had a patch [6] for
that already. Gary seemed [7] fine with it, it just got stalled by
nobody reviewing the code changes. Due to the NM 0.9 port, the patch
would need to be rebased first.

Sascha

[1] message-id:toesjdixt3d.fsf at twin.sascha.silbe.org
    https://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2012-June/msg00103.html
[2] message-id:"1307282514-sup-5734 at xo15-sascha.sascha.silbe.org"
    https://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/thread.html#31679
[3] http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-06-05T16:17:34
[4] http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-06-05T16:17:34#i_2671243
[5] http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-06-05T16:17:34#i_2671359
[6] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/846/
[7] message-id:"5F1E4CCB-208F-47BE-8B39-BDDE8450CCAD at gmail.com"
    https://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/032077.html
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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