debian-installer fails to escape or quote special characters in /etc/network/interfaces WPA key

[Jason Rogers]

I installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 64-bit (Precise Pangolin) using the minimal ISO (mini.iso). During installation, debian-installer asked for my wireless networking information and successfully used it to connect wirelessly to the network. It also wrote my wireless networking information to /etc/network/interfaces. However, the WPA key that I entered contained at least one special character, and debian-installer did not escape or quote the special character(s) in /etc/network/interfaces. The result was that, on reboot, the system hung for a very long time during the boot process as it tried (unsuccessfully) to re-connect to the wireless network. I fixed the problem by simply quoting the WPA key listed in /etc/network/interfaces. This should happen automatically if the key contains special characters.

Example:

Originally, the relevant part of /etc/network/interfaces reads something like this:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-ssid SSIDHere
    wpa-psk KeyWith$pecialCharacters

It ought to have read something like this:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-ssid SSIDHere
    wpa-psk "KeyWith$pecialCharacters"

It might also be that the SSID should be quoted/escaped, too, but I'm not sure about that.

[Jason Rogers (jrog)]

Changing to Invalid, as the problem is now persisting even with the quoted passphrase. I have no idea why it was working earlier, but it appears that there is more going on here than I initially thought.