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Wifi Pipe

So the other day when I was using wifi-select (awesome tool) to connect to a friends hot-spot, I realized, "hey! This would be great as an openbox pipe menu." I'm fairly decent in bash and I knew both netcfg and wifi-select were in bash so why not rewrite it that way?

Wifi-Pipe

A simplified version of wifi-select which will scan for networks and populate an openbox right-click menu item with available networks. Displays security type and signal strength. Click on a network to connect via netcfg the same way wifi-select does it.

Zenity is used to ask for a password and notify of a bad connection. One can optionally remove the netcfg profile if the connection fails.

What's needed

You have to be using netcfg to manage your wireless
You have to install zenity
You have to save the script as ~/.config/openbox/wifi-pipe and make it executable:

  chmod +x ~/.config/openbox/wifi-pipe

You have to add a sudoers entry to allow passwordless sudo on this script and netcfg (!)

  USERNAME ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/netcfg
  USERNAME ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home/USERNAME/.config/openbox/wifi-pipe

You have to adjust ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml like so:

<menu id="root-menu" label="Openbox 3">
<menu id="pipe-wifi" label="Wifi" execute="sudo /home/USERNAME/.config/openbox/wifi-pipe INTERFACE" />
<menu id="term-menu"/>
<item label="Run...">
  <action name="Execute">
    <command>gmrun</command>
  </action>
</item>
...

where USERNAME is you and INTERFACE is probably wlan0 or similar

Simply openbox --reconfigure and you should be good to go.

The script

#!/bin/bash
#
# pbrisbin 2009
#
# http://pbrisbin.com:8080/sources/wifi-pipe
#
# simplified version of wifi-select designed to output as an openbox pipe menu
#
# required:
#   netcfg
#   zenity
#   NOPASSWD entries for this and netcfg through visudo
# 
#   the following in menu.xml:
#     <menu id="pipe-wifi" label="Wifi" execute="sudo /path/to/wifi.pipe interface"/>
#
# the idea is to run this script once to scan/print, then again immediately to connect.
# therefore, if you scan but don't connect, a temp file is left in /tmp. the next scan
# will overwrite it, and the next connect will remove it.
#
###

# source this just to get PROFILE_DIR
. /usr/lib/network/network
[ -z "$PROFILE_DIR" ] && PROFILE_DIR='/etc/network.d/'

# awk code for parsing iwlist output
# putting it here removes the wifi-select dependency
# and allows for my own tweaking
# prints a list "essid=security=quality_as_percentage"
PARSER='
BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS="="; }
/\<Cell/ { if (essid) print essid, security, quality[2]/quality[3]*100; security="none" }
/\<ESSID:/ { essid=substr($2, 2, length($2) - 2) } # discard quotes
/\<Quality=/ { split($1, quality, "[=/]") }
/\<Encryption key:on/ { security="wep" }
/\<IE:.*WPA.*/ { security="wpa" }
END { if (essid) print essid, security, quality[2]/quality[3]*100 }
'

errorout() { 
  echo "<openbox_pipe_menu>"
  echo "<item label=\"$1\" />" 
  echo "</openbox_pipe_menu>"
  exit 1
}

create_profile() {
  ESSID="$1"; INTERFACE="$2"; SECURITY="$3"; KEY="$4"
  PROFILE_FILE="$PROFILE_DIR$ESSID"

  cat > "$PROFILE_FILE" << END_OF_PROFILE
CONNECTION="wireless"
ESSID="$ESSID"
INTERFACE="$INTERFACE"
DESCRIPTION="Automatically generated profile"
SCAN="yes"
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT="10"
SECURITY="$SECURITY"
END_OF_PROFILE

  # i think wifi-select should adopt these perms too...
  if [ -n "$KEY" ]; then
    echo "KEY=\"$KEY\"" >> "$PROFILE_FILE"
    chmod 600 "$PROFILE_FILE"
  else
    chmod 644 "$PROFILE_FILE"
  fi
}

print_menu() {
  # scan for networks
  iwlist $INTERFACE scan 2>/dev/null | awk "$PARSER" | sort -t= -nrk3 > /tmp/networks.tmp

  # exit if none found
  if [ ! -s /tmp/networks.tmp ]; then 
    rm /tmp/networks.tmp
    errorout "no networks found."
  fi

  # otherwise print the menu
  local IFS='='
  echo "<openbox_pipe_menu>"
  while read ESSID SECURITY QUALITY; do
    echo "<item label=\"$ESSID ($SECURITY) ${QUALITY/.*/}%\">" # trim decimals
    echo "  <action name=\"Execute\">"
    echo "    <command>sudo $0 $INTERFACE connect \"$ESSID\"</command>"
    echo "  </action>"
    echo "</item>"
  done < /tmp/networks.tmp
  echo "</openbox_pipe_menu>"
}

connect() {
  # check for an existing profile
  PROFILE_FILE="$(grep -REl "ESSID=[\"']?$ESSID[\"']?" "$PROFILE_DIR" | grep -v '~$' | head -1)"

  # if found use it, else create a new profile
  if [ -n "$PROFILE_FILE" ]; then
    PROFILE=$(basename "$PROFILE_FILE")
  else
    PROFILE="$ESSID"
    SECURITY="$(awk -F '=' "/$ESSID/"'{print $2}' /tmp/networks.tmp | head -1)"

    # ask for the security key if needed
    if [ "$SECURITY" != "none" ]; then
      KEY="$(zenity --entry --title="Authentication" --text="Please enter $SECURITY key for $ESSID" --hide-text)"
    fi

    # create the new profile
    create_profile "$ESSID" "$INTERFACE" "$SECURITY" "$KEY"
  fi

  # connect
  netcfg2 "$PROFILE" > /tmp/output.tmp
  
  # if failed, ask about removal of created profile
  if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    zenity --question \
           --title="Connection failed" \
           --text="$(grep -Eo "[\-\>]\ .*$" /tmp/output.tmp) \n Remove $PROFILE_FILE?" \
           --ok-label="Remove profile"

    [ $? -eq 0 ] && rm $PROFILE_FILE
  fi

  rm /tmp/output.tmp
  rm /tmp/networks.tmp
}

[ $(id -u) -ne 0 ] && errorout "root access required."
[ -z "$1" ] && errorout "usage: $0 [interface] (connect [ESSID])"

INTERFACE="$1"; shift

# i added a sleep if we need to explicitly bring it up
# b/c youll get "no networks found" when you scan right away
# this only happens if we aren't up already
if ! ifconfig | grep -q $INTERFACE; then
  ifconfig $INTERFACE up &>/dev/null || errorout "$INTERFACE not up"
  while ! ifconfig | grep -q $INTERFACE; do sleep 1; done
fi

if [ "$1" = "connect" ]; then
  ESSID="$2"
  connect
else
  print_menu
fi

Screenshots

The menu itself:

Asking for a key

Failing b/c i don't know my neighbors wifi key... yet:

Trying to connect when already connected:

I have not tested this extensively but it was working for me in most cases. Any updates/fixes will be edited right in the originating arch forum post.

Comments

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