NM now starts wpa_supplicant automatically

I posted recently about network-manager, daemon 'NetworkManager', not starting 'wpa_supplicant' daemon automatically, though it does in Pyro:

http://bkhome.org/news/201908/nice-gui-for-network-manager.html

Then yesterday, testing modem-manager-gui, found that dbus needed a fix for launching helper-apps:

http://bkhome.org/news/201908/modem-manager-gui-compiled-in-buster.html

It turned out that the dbus fix also fixed automatic loading of wpa_supplicant, so it isn't required to explicitly start wpa_supplicant.

I don't know anything about dbus, and I am sure will forget how it was fixed. So, here are some brief notes for future reference...

This file needs suid bit set:

/usr/lib/dbus-1.0/dbus-daemon-launch-helper

...why that should be required when running as root, I don't know. Ask the dbus developers. From online reading, this issue came in at a fairly recent version of dbus.

The actual dbus file responsible for starting wpa_supplicant:

/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/fi.w1.wpa_supplicant.service

One issue that I did encounter, is that this file needs to assign permissions to allow the wpa_supplicant-related *.service files to run:

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/wpa_supplicant.conf

Lots of fun, heh?  

Tags: easy