When attempting to configure the wireless interface wlan0, managed by
ndiswrapper, with systemsettings, the interface file that was written ended up
containing the lines:
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid RGHNLW
wireless-key **********
The asterisks were present, as shown, rather than the correct key. As a result,
when I ran 'ifup --verbose wlan0', $IF_WIRELESS_KEY became "**********", and
if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools tried to run "iwconfig wlan0 key **********", thereby
failing to set the key and therefore not associating with the access point. Thus:
root@rghlaptop:/etc/network# ifup --verbose wlan0
Configuring interface wlan0=wlan0 (inet)
run-parts --verbose /etc/network/if-pre-up.d
run-parts: executing /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools
Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
invalid argument "if-down.d".
The argument is taken from expansion of "*": if-down-d is the first file in the
directory from which I was running ifup, viz: /etc/network.
Editing /etc/network/interfaces by hand and and replacing the offending line
with a good one corrects the problem. So the issue is what systemsettings writes
to this file.
Confirmed. Working on the fix.