Hidden WPA Password Prompt

[JohnnyFive]

Hello community,

Has anyone else encountered the really irritating issue of a hidden WPA network not auto connecting, and prompting for the root password when you manually select 'Connect to hidden wireless network'?

It works fine if I enable broadcasting of SSID but a proviso of my broadband is to keep this disabled. Ubuntu does it without any issue, can't figure out why it won't work on FC14.

J5

[PatMcLJr]

humm, guess no else has this problem, except maybe me too??

any hints?

Pat Jr.

[smr54]

The only thing I can suggest is to do it manually rather than use NetworkManager. That is, remove NetworkManager from startup, use network instead and configure wlan0 with wpa_supplicant.

I have instructions on that at http://home.roadrunner.com/~computer.../wireless.html


I should add that I mean set it up manually. Once you have it set, if you set wpa_supplicant to run at boot with chkconfig (and /etc/sysconfig-network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0) it will automatically run at boot.

[JohnnyFive]

Ah well since then I did a bit of investigative homework. Seems that when you connect to a hidden network, Network Manager puts the details in a root-only-readable file hence the pw prompt. If you change the permissions on the file it won't work properly. I guess the developers think that if you hide your SSID then you're a security concious kind of guy (or gal).

I tried using wicd instead of Network Manager which worked fine on one machine, but had trouble with drivers on another, so you might want to give that a go but ymmv. My only course of action was to revert back to my old Ubuntu 9.10 setup on the machine which didn't work on wicd, as the version of gnome on there was a bit older and didn't plague me with password prompts!

HTH

[jakebpg]

Originally Posted by JohnnyFive

Ah well since then I did a bit of investigative homework. Seems that when you connect to a hidden network, Network Manager puts the details in a root-only-readable file hence the pw prompt. If you change the permissions on the file it won't work properly. I guess the developers think that if you hide your SSID then you're a security concious kind of guy (or gal).

I tried using wicd instead of Network Manager which worked fine on one machine, but had trouble with drivers on another, so you might want to give that a go but ymmv. My only course of action was to revert back to my old Ubuntu 9.10 setup on the machine which didn't work on wicd, as the version of gnome on there was a bit older and didn't plague me with password prompts!

HTH

You have to use wpa-supplicant for it to work at boot. You can leave network manager enabled just enable both network and wpa_supplicant. There are two files in wpa supplicant that need to be configured. The first is wpa_supplicant and the other is wpa_supplicant.conf. I think if you search wpa_supplicant in these forums you will find my post about it and what I had to do to get it to work along with a couple of other people I helped to get networking to work at boot. There are examples of wpa_supplicant.conf in your doc directory located at /usr/share/doc/wpa that will assist in getting this set-up working for you. Also in one of my posts I have posted those two files as an example of what they should look like for comparison, now keep in mind my setup is different in that I use WEP and not WPA but the concept is the same.
With wpa you shouldn't need to enter a password since it will use the root account when setting up the network since root has control of the system and files at boot.