[arch-projects] [netctl] Few observations

[Jouke Witteveen]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Leonid Isaev <lisaev at umail.iu.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been running testing/netctl for a couple of days now and noticed some
> issues (some of which are not really netctl specific). I thought it might be
> better to bring them up here, as opposed to flyspray.
>
> 1. There used to be a DHCP_OPTIONS variable in netcfg, but it is never
> mentioned in netctl documentation. Meanwhile, ip_set() in globals, does have
> DHCPOptions. Was making this variable invisible to the user intentional? It is
> quite convenient when dealing with buggy DHCP servers (e.g. -d switch for
> dhcpcd)...

By the capitalization, you can tell that DHCPOptions is intended to be
usable in profiles. However, this feature went undocumented because in
the past users have made a mess with it. For instance, by
backgrounding the daemon. If DHCP servers are buggy, they should be
fixed, thats not netctl's fault. However, if you can come up with a
piece of documentation that makes users not want to use this variable,
I'd love to include it.

> 2. There is a WPADriver variable whuch is not read if a profile is included in
> a group by netctl-auto (because profiles are parsed in separate subshells).
> This a good thing, as different profiles can have incompatible values of
> WPADriver, but I think it should be included in documentation (it can
> seriously confuse a user, myself included, who looks at ps auxww).

Your new documentation suggests the same holds for other variables
too, but I cannot quickly see which ones. If WPADriver is the only
one, I would prefer the suggestion is removed from the documentation
;-).

> 3. This is the main issue, albeit also present in netcfg. With wpa_supplicant
> 2.0 and wpa_actiond 1.4 we noticed a sizeable delay when shutting down
> netctl-auto (resp. net-auto-wireless) in a WPA-EAP environment. This is
> somehow related to the fact that wpa_actiond is never killed by netctl/netcfg
> which only terminates wpa_supplicant/dhcp client. The real problem may be in
> wpa_supplicant, but regardless, netctl/netcfg should properly clean up after
> itself.

What is the problem, precisely? If wpa_actiond sees the supplicant has
disappeared, it quits. In a systemd setting, this all seems perfectly
fine, doesn't it?

> Pts. (2) and (3) are 'fixed' by the following small patch...
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Leonid Isaev
> GnuPG key: 0x164B5A6D
> Fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D

Regards,
- Jouke