After switching from wireless-tools to wpa_supplicant, network services such as sshd no longer reliably start during boot. The issue seems to be that network service init scripts can't tell whether wpa_supplicant has established a connection since it runs in the background, or they just assume that it has not. After some Googling, I found that setting RC_NET_STRICT_CHECKING="lo" solves the problem: sshd now starts at boot every time. My request: perhaps this could be suggested as part of the configuration process for wpa_supplicant in the Gentoo Wireless Networking documentation. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Configure networking with wireless-tools. 2. Enable sshd. 3. Switch to wpa_supplicant. Actual Results: sshd does not start at boot. Expected Results: Under proper configuration, sshd should start at boot. $ sudo lspci | grep Network 02:0a.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (rev 04) $ sudo wpa_supplicant -v wpa_supplicant v0.5.7
Yes, I've spoken with Uberlord (the author of openrc) and was suggested basically the same. Adding openrc maintainers for comment *AND* for update of the documentation in the openrc oncifguration file.
OpenRC has no such value anymore. Due to improvements in wpa_supplicant and similar progams I have no problem with the default for baselayout-1 and associated documentation being changed.
I don't think we should change the docs for this one incident. I've always used wpa_supplicant, and using "lo" would result in utter failure for me. As mentioned in our handbook, use "lo" if you don't care about any particular interface being considered "up" at boot time. This means that if I'm on a wireless connection but use "lo" instead of "wlan0", my wired NIC could be brought up, halting the system boot while the DHCP requests time out. Yeah, that's not ideal. The only type of setup that needs just "lo" for a multi-NIC laptop would be one that uses net-misc/wicd, since that ups the interface on its own, and you don't want the usual initscripts interfering. But again, that's more of an edge case.
On my system, wpa_supplicant would do its work in the background. I would have my wireless NIC up immediately after boot, but sshd would never get started. Making this change is the only way I've found to make sure I can rely on sshd, but it sounds like if I had a wired connection as well, this would cause problems. Is there a preferred way to handle the situation?
Closing as per comment #3 and comment #2 -- hopefully openrc will be going stable soon, which obviates the need to talk about baselayout-1 edge cases. Regarding comment #4, your best bet is to check on the Gentoo forums, or the gentoo-user ML archives; it may have been answered already.
