likely wifi disconnection during "change wireless network" step

[msgctl]

Issue by hjwp
Friday Mar 11, 2016 at 06:49 GMT
Originally opened as radicallyopensecurity/netaidkit-legacy#86

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when configuring the netaidkit to connect to a local wifi using the "Change Wireless Network" step, I've found I often get disconnected from the netaidkit's own wifi (perhaps while the nak is applying the new settings?). but what happens next is that my laptop will often reconnect to the local wifi instead of the netaidkit's, if the local wifi is one it already knows.

this can be very confusing, because it happens transparently -- as far as the user is concerned, they just clicked the "connect" button and they then see the "Connecting" dialog with a spinner what they don't realise is they're now disconnected from the netaidkit, so that spinner will never stop spinning. And in fact, if they refresh the page, they will see an error from their browser (eg "problem loading page") not be able to reconnect. unless they realise what's happened.

suggestion: add a message to the "connecting" prompt which says, eg

during this step, your pc may become disconnected from the netaidkit's wifi ("insert wifi name here?"), and your pc may automatically connect to another wifi. please wait a few moments and reconnect to it to check that this operation completed successfully.

[msgctl]

We're aware of the problem, unfortunately fixing it in OpenWRT would take time. I actually discussed this with developers: https://github.com/radicallyopensecurity/netaidkit-nakd/blob/34998399a41582fab45cc51706bf877a257d784a/root/usr/share/nakd/scripts/restart_iface.sh

We'll be supporting different hardware platforms later, this may solve the problem, too.

UI enhancements are the good way to go, thanks!