wps_supplicant@.service not present in Jessie

Question

I've been following along with the WiFi repeater setup and I've hit a snag. I am running Jessie rather than Stretch. I don't have wps_supplicant@.service in /lib/systemd/system/, just wps_supplicant.service. I've been searching across Google to find out if I need this file or not. I haven't found a conclusive enough answer. So, my question is if I need wps_supplicant@.service so I can use the configuration for wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf or does wps_supplicant.service notice this file on top of wps_supplicant.conf?

Answer 1

You are always talking about wps_supplicant* but there is no config file or service with this name. It is allways named wpa_supplicant (note wpa instead of wps). If you use the wrong name then you will not find it of course.

To follow the setup Access point as WiFi repeater, optional with bridge you need the interface-specific version of wpa_supplicant, otherwise you cannot use wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service. To build such interface-specific versions a template is used, named wpa_supplicant@.service. On Raspbian Stretch it looks like this:

rpi ~$ systemctl cat wpa_supplicant@.service
# /lib/systemd/system/wpa_supplicant@.service
[Unit]
Description=WPA supplicant daemon (interface-specific version)
Requires=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
Before=network.target
Wants=network.target

# NetworkManager users will probably want the dbus version instead.

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/sbin/wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-%I.conf -Dnl80211,wext -i%I

[Install]
Alias=multi-user.target.wants/wpa_supplicant@%i.service

As you can see it uses parameter %i and %I that are replaced by the item after @ in the service name, e.g. with wlan0. This is different from the default wpa_supplicant.service.

Raspbian Jessie is the first version coming with systemd. It seems that early version does not support interface-specific versions of services, but I don't know. I haven't worked with Jessie since years. You should really consider to upgrade to Stretch.