Wifish

Wifish (from wifi.sh) is meant to do very little. Design Goals are

1. List Available Wifi APs
2. Connect to an AP

That is all.

Requirements

1. wpa_supplicant - Tested with 2.4.
2. gawk - Sorry other awks, Multidimensional arrays make this much cleaner.
3. dialog - Optional For ncurses menu and password prompt

Usage

Get it

clone this repo

% git clone git://github.com/bougyman/wifish

Configure it

Optional

A few environment variables can modify the behavior of wifish

• SCAN_SECONDS - How long an AP scan waits for scanned AP results. Default is 0 seconds, as a running wpa_supplicant will generally have a viable scan_result already. If you have a problem not finding APs, try

SCAN_SECONDS=5 wifish

• WIFISH_DEFAULT - Sets what Command runs when wifish is called with no arguments. Defaults to menu or list, depending on if dialog is available.

Use it

Make sure wpa_supplicant is running and you have access

% wpa_cli status

If this errors, FIX IT BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER, NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK

Common fixes:

UPDATE You may use the included sv/wpa_supplicant service which should get wpa_cli status to work for you. See Supervising wpa_supplicant

1. Start wpa_supplicant Example: wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_spplicant.conf -i wlan0 You may need to modify your conf file location as well as the -i interface, and this must be done as root or with sudo

2. Make sure you have rights to the wpa_supplicant control socket, take a look a the first few lines of wpa_supplicant.conf and it should be clear what group you have to be in. Of course you can always just run wifish as root (But don't)

   ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
   ctrl_interface_group=wheel
   update_config=1
   

   In this case you would have to be a member of the 'wheel' group. Make sure update_config=1 is set in the configuration file, as well.

3. Read some docs

4. See Support, below

Now run wifish

% cd wifish
% ./wifish

This should list all available APs.

Without arguments, wifish will automatically present a menu of APs if you have dialog installed, otherwise it will show a list of APs. This default can be configured (see Configuration).

• No dialog installed, wifish with no args calls

  % wifish list
  

• dialog installed, wifish with no args calls

  % wifish menu
  

Commands

All commands can be shortened to uniqueness

wifish m and wifish menu both run the menu command

Currently implemented

• list - Lists all available APs (from iw scan)
• menu - Menu of APs to connect to (requires dialog)
• connect <ssid> - Connects to an AP wifish c MySSID

Currently works when connecting to Open, WPA-PSK, and WPA2-PSK (and mixed-mode WPA) with or without TKIP

In Testing

• connect - Without args, tries to find something to connect to.

  Are you feeling lucky? Maybe use wifish menu instead

Installation

Void Linux

% xbps-install -S wifish

Other Linux

% sudo ./install.sh

Now you can use 'wifish' from anywhere without the fully qualified path

Supervising wpa_supplicant

In order to keep wpa_supplicant running all the time, you can background it (in Fixes, above) or properly supervise it. The sv/wpa_supplicant directory is a service directory which will work with runit, daemontools, s6, and many others. It will install to /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant when running install.sh. To enable the service, first edit /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant/conf to match your wifi interface and optionally wpa_supplicant control group. Then symlink the service directory to your supervision directory.

Examples:

% ln -s /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant /service # Daemontools
% ln -s /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant /var/service # Runit on VoidLinux
% ln -s /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant /etc/service # Runit on Debian/Ubuntu
% sv-enable wpa_supplicant # Anything with sv-helper on it

Once linked, wpa_supplicant will run forever, on every boot, always logging to /var/log/wpa_supplicant/current

• note: the logger for the wpa_supplicant service (log/run) uses rsvlog, part of the runit suite. This file can be modified to use another logger, simply edit /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant/log/run (logger -t works for most syslogs)

Uninstall

Void LInux

% xbps-remove wifish

Other Linux

% rm -rf /usr/local/share/wifish /usr/local/bin/wifish /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant

Support

• F.A.Q.
• file a gh issue or catch me on #voidlinux on the Freenode IRC Network