On 12/06/2016 09:04 AM, Robert Latest wrote: > Not in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, despite suggestions in > every bit of documentation that I got my hands on. In fact, that file > doesn't even exist on my jessie system. Nevertheless, when I > configured the WiFi network using some GUI tool in the XFCE desktop, > it worked.
Disclaimer: I'm not a user of XFCE, so if that does something really weird, this may not apply. However, most graphical tools interface with NetworkManager, and that stores its configuration in /etc/NetworkManager. You'll likely find your password stored in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/$SSID (file only readable/writable as root; also please don't modify it while NetworkManager is running, it will overwrite it without warning; modifying it when NetworkManager is stopped is fine though) where you replace $SSID with the SSID of your WiFi. On some desktops (e.g. GNOME) the Password can be stored in the personal user's keyring/wallet/password manager instead, but then you need to be logged in for NetworkManager to have access to the password - which is not true in your case because you mentioned: > Even after a reboot, with no desktop running, I could ssh > into the system via WiFi. So that means that NetworkManager has the password stored directly. Note that when using NetworkManager, it configures its own instance of wpa_supplicant, so you should never touch a configuration file for wpa_supplicant yourself in this kind of setup. (You could of course stop using NetworkManager and configure wpa_supplicant manually, but I really wouldn't recommend that; I don't think wpa_supplicant is designed in a way that makes direct end-user usage easy - there's a reason why NetworkManager exists instead of desktop environments communicating directly with wpa_supplicant.) > BTW, I did find a wpa_supplicant.conf file in some deep subdir of > /etc/dbus-1/... That's just the DBus policy, that doesn't configure how wpa_supplicant reacts, but only how the DBus daemon handles the access policy for wpa_supplicant. (DBus is a communication bus used on Linux and other systems; most desktop envirnoments, including XFCE, use it internally for some things.) Unless you know what you're doing, I wouldn't touch that, otherwise you could end up stopping NetworkManager from communicating with wpa_supplicant and then your WiFi could stop working altogether. Regards, Christian