Enabling Wi-Fi on First boot

[Alberto Bursi]

On 06/07/21 09:12, Enrico Mioso wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 5 Jul 2021, Paul Spooren wrote:
> 
>> Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2021 09:06:14
>> From: Paul Spooren <mail at aparcar.org>
>> To: Enrico Mioso <mrkiko.rs at gmail.com>, openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>> Subject: Re: Enabling Wi-Fi on First boot
>>
>>
>> On 7/5/21 8:45 PM, Enrico Mioso wrote:
>>> Hello all!!
>>>
>>> I would like to know your opinion on a topic I know has already been 
>>> discussed: enabling Wi-Fi on first boot.
>>> I would very very much like to see this feature present in OpenWRt: 
>>> because I find myself in a scenario where plugging an Ethernet cable 
>>> after a fresh sysupgrade without keeping settings (due a a major 
>>> upgrade or just to "start clean") could be impractical.
>> I think you can add uci-default scripts to enable it or do you want a 
>> config option during build time?
> 
> Hello Paul!!
> 
> Well, I tought about uci-defaults, but I tough it won't be so easy to 
> implement due to the fact Wi-Fi is probed asynchronously, and on some 
> devices i saw it takes a little bit (Netgear R7800).
> I would have liked to have something already implemented in OpenWRt, so 
> it could be looked at by more people and have much higher chances of 
> working on all devices.
> 
> Enrico
> 

The only thing that must be done by a uci-defaults script is to set the 
wifi as enabled in the uci config.
Afaik all devices ship with a default config for an open wifi network 
called "OpenWrt" for all their radios, but have

option disabled '1'

in both the device and wifi-iface text blocks, which disables the wifi.

The uci-defaults script should just delete that line recursively along 
the whole /etc/config/wifi config file and it can be done with sed.

Since uci-defaults scripts are run before everything else, the device 
should just have all wifi enabled on first boot no matter what wifi 
hardware it actually uses.

You can easily turn this in a package (that only installs a uci-defaults 
script), just look at any other package that sets a uci-default script 
like this
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/bcp38/Makefile
and use it as a template for your own.

Since there are strong opinions are about keeping wifi off by default 
(last time I checked even devices that have no other network interfaces 
can't have a wifi enabled on first boot, forcing users to do a first 
config through the debug UART console or integrate a custom wifi config 
file in a custom image) I do not think many core developers will want to 
merge this package in core repository, but you can try.

I think there should not be much problems if you send your package to 
community packages repository.
https://github.com/openwrt/packages

-Alberto

>>>
>>> From an implementation perspective, I don't think this feature needs 
>>> to be present on images we build with builtbots, nor official images 
>>> at all. It may be a config option a user can check when self-building 
>>> his/her images.
>>> This would allow us to relax the security settings for the moment 
>>> being, and discuss and plan them later on. It seems to me there is 
>>> the general desire for having such a feature.
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot!
>>>
>>> Enrico
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>>> https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
>>
> 
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