Subject: Re: bug#38653: wpa-supplicant dbus failure leads to networking service failure

From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2020 12:44:26 +0100

Christopher,

Thanks for the bug report, and sorry for the late response.

Christopher Howard <[email-masked]> writes:

> Under this guix commit, wpa_supplicant service fails to initialize,
> which takes out networking also.
>
> '''
> root@eowyn ~# guix describe
> Generation 2	Dec 17 2019 08:30:38	(current)
>   guix 328dd9b
>     repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>     branch: master
>     commit: 328dd9b7c2030dfb66013e12f055b5b449c94007
> '''
>
> From /var/log/messages:
>
> '''
> Dec 17 09:31:29 localhost wpa_supplicant[361]: dbus: Could not request
> service name: already registered

I suspect what happened is that you are using
wpa-supplicant-service-type, and also added 'wpa-supplicant' to the
(packages ...) field of your system configuration.  The latter will
include a D-Bus policy file for "fi.w1.wpa_supplicant1", which
wpa-supplicant-service-type also tries to register.

As a workaround, you can set (dbus? #f) in wpa-supplicant-configuration,
or remove 'wpa-supplicant' from the system packages.  If you want
wpa-supplicant installed globally, you can use 'wpa-supplicant-minimal'
instead.

Can you confirm?

Not sure how we can make this more robust.  The easiest fix is probably
to default to (dbus? #f); the only program I know that use the D-Bus
interface is NetworkManager, which has its own service in Guix.