Re: Network Manager Autologin

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 15:54 +0100, Pablo Martí wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Alexander Sack <asac jwsdot com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 03:11:13PM +0100, Pablo Martí wrote:
> >> Sure! I also think that the Firefox approach is not the right one, is
> >> just that I'm not very fond on NM's dispatcher
> >> architecture/capabilities. I kinda like the description/mockup given
> >> here [0]. Marcelo asked in nm-list 1 year ago and he was pointed to a
> >> dispatcher script[1].
> >>
> >> [0] http://blog.marcelotoledo.org/2007/09/01/network-manager-with-wispr-support/
> >> [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2007-September/msg00002.html
> >>
> >
> > OK thanks for the links. I really think this can be done outside of NM
> > applet to things started.
> >
> > Writing a wispr-applet that listens to D-Bus events from NM and which
> > does the wispr probing and authentication business should be fairly
> > easy.
> 
> Thanks for the input Alexander, much appreciated. What do other
> developers think of this approach? Tambet? Dan?

Shouldn't be part of NM, but NM should expose all the necessary
information to allow auto-login to be possible using external tools.

If that includes requesting WSP information explicitly from the DHCP
server, that's great, we should add that.  The DHCP information is
already exposed over D-Bus and thus any app that listens for NM events
should be able to get it.

You can tie specific logins pretty easily to each connection's UUID,
thus if you know that your "Starbucks" connection just came up (as
opposed to any other connection) you could certainly match that up with
stored credentials and try to auto-login with those first before doing
any probing or whatever.  Basically, if the AP is at least WPA
encrypted, and NM connected, there's a 95% chance that nobody is
spoofing the connection, and that you really are connected to Starbucks,
so you can save some time probing by just trying stored Starbucks auth
info first, maybe.

Dan