Saturday, May 05, 2018

Setup WiFi to auto-connect regardless of logged in state (UPDATED)

There are plenty of times where I would like to start up my desktop machine (running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) and just have it boot and me log into it via SSH so that I can get some work done.  Well, in order to achieve that wish, you need to have your wifi connection auto-connnect at boot time.

To do this, there are some things you need to do:

1.  Go to your wifi connection in the upper right of your screen and click on "Edit Connections".
2.  Once in there, you need to click on your connected wifi ssid and select "Edit".
3.  Go to the "General" tab and select "All users may connect to this network".  (without this, the rest of this is moot and it will not work)

Ok, that is the only gui portion of this setup.  Next:

4.  Create the file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and add the content that follows:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant group=wheel
network={
  ssid="your_connection_ssid"
  scan_ssid=1
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  psk="password"
}
In the above code, you will input your ssid that you would like to connect to and also enter your password for the connection.  If you are using an encryption method other than WPA/WPA2, then you will need to reference the man page for wpa_supplicant.conf.  There are plenty of examples to help you out. 

After you have that file all setup, save it.

5.  Issue the following command on the command line, as root or with sudo:

wpa_supplicant -B -i wlp4s0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

You should see a message that says something to the effect that wpa_supplicant initialization was successful.

After you have completed those steps, go ahead and reboot the machine and watch the login screen.  If all is correct and right with the configuration, you should see the wifi connection show as connected.  You can test this by ssh'ing to the machine.  Enjoy!


UPDATE:  I took the opportunity to reinstall my Linux system to go from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04.  I know its a bit extreme to do a full re-install, but:

1.  An distribution upgrade wasn't yet available
2.  There wasn't anything I couldn't re-setup on the machine
3.  Ubuntu moved away from Unity to the Gnome desktop, so I wanted everything clean and fresh.

I will say this though, auto-connection of the wifi (seeing as how you tell it how to connect during installation) just WORKS with Ubuntu 18.04.  You just have to make sure to install the openssh-server package.

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

How to list available versions of a Pypi package

While working on requirements that someone had for a pypi package, I found myself needing to list out the versions of the package that were available.  I didn't want to have to go to the pypi website, navigate to the package and then figure out how to see the available versions.  So, to the Googles I went.

In order to install a specific version of a package, you would run:

pip install =1.0.0

in order to install version 1.0.0 of said package.  But, if you provide nonsense as the option, like so:

pip install =blah

then what you get back is an error listing all of the available versions for that package:


> pip install mod_wsgi==blah
Collecting mod_wsgi==blah
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement mod_wsgi==blah (from versions: 4.1.0, 4.1.1, 4.1.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.0, 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3, 4.2.4, 4.2.5, 4.2.6, 4.2.7, 4.2.8, 4.3.0, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.4.0, 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.4.4, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 4.4.7, 4.4.8, 4.4.9, 4.4.10, 4.4.11, 4.4.12, 4.4.13, 4.4.14, 4.4.15, 4.4.16, 4.4.17, 4.4.18, 4.4.19, 4.4.20, 4.4.21, 4.4.22, 4.4.23, 4.5.0, 4.5.1, 4.5.2, 4.5.3, 4.5.4, 4.5.5, 4.5.6, 4.5.7, 4.5.8, 4.5.9, 4.5.10, 4.5.11, 4.5.12, 4.5.13, 4.5.14, 4.5.15, 4.5.16, 4.5.17, 4.5.18, 4.5.19, 4.5.20, 4.5.21, 4.5.22, 4.5.23, 4.5.24, 4.6.0, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.6.3, 4.6.4)
No matching distribution found for mod_wsgi==blah

Good to know its that easy.
 
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