Hello,

We use 802.X authentication with certificates stored on smart card, this seems to be working with wpa_supplicant, however I'm a bit confused when it comes to wpa_supplicant and the (if any) relation with dhclient.

Today we use NetworkManager to handle the connections, however NM is not able to pass the needed pkcs11 options to wpa_supplicant, and therefore I'm currently trying to use wpa_supplicant in "standalone" mode.

So the procedure today is basically,
- Stop NM.
- Stop dhclient (started by NM)
- Stop wpa_supplicant (started by NM)
- Start wpa_supplicant
- Start wpa_gui to connect and enter pin.
- Start dhclient on the interface we just brought up.

This feels rather messy, although as a sysadmin you can live with it, however as a regular user you can not.

Basically I have two questions,
- Since dhclient already is started by NM with dbussupport, why cant wpa_supplicant/gui talk to dhclient and request an ip when a successful connection is made, should I manually have to start dhclient whenever I've connected through wpa_supplicant, or am I missing something ?
- Does anybody have any suggestions at all how to make this easy and workable for a regular user ?

We use Rhel 6.
It's a shame that NM can't handle certificates stored on smart cards - that would have been the ultimate solution.