Only root is able to scan wifi

[AndersonTorres]

While installing Gobolinux on real hardware, I have stuck on this problem described before:
https://github.com/orgs/gobolinux/discussions/40

l decided to abort the installation, reboot and use a Guix live cd to boot it via a bit of grub-fu.

Logging in as non-root, I tried to use the network widget on Awesome, however it did not recognize wireless networks.
I looked at htop to investigate what was happening, and noticed that the widget calls iwlist scan. So I tried to run it manually.

And here we are: if it is ran by root the scan works OK, but the non-root user receives a "no scan results".

How can I solve this problem and allow non-root users to scan and possibly configure network/wifi?

[nuc1eon]

It looks like this error gobolinux/GoboNet#5 (comment)

Indeed while researching I have found that iwlist scan works only with root permissions - which kind of sucks.

Here are some solutions: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/169212/iwlist-scanning-without-root-privileges

Most of them are about running the iwlist command with sudo but prevent prompting for a password: %mygroup ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: iwlist wlanX scan.

Another one is to set the setuid bit on the binary, eg sudo chmod u+s /sbin/iwlist.

Or setting capabilities setcap 'cap_net_admin+eip' /sbin/iwlist.

Or straight out using wpa_supplicant which works without root for scanning: wpa_cli -i wlan0 scan > /dev/null; sleep 5; wpa_cli -i wlan0 scan_results

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We'll have to consider how to fix this in our tooling. I tend to the capabilites based solution.

Thanks for posting!