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About a month ago I reinstalled an RPi 4B with Ubuntu server 24.04.1 LTS. Today I did the exact same thing with a Zero 2 W. I used the customizing feature of the Pi Imager with the same settings.

I just double checked, both boxes are Ubuntu server aarch64 and

VERSION="24.04.1 LTS (Noble Numbat)"

The interesting thing is that the older one has always worked fine, while today's host couldn't connect to the wi-fi. I repeated the process 2x, because I thought I made a mistake. The Imager stores the wi-fi password encrypted:

    access-points:
        mywlan:
            password: bd5281c46bf83b31[.deleted.]c97d059ed9d7e84f

Not an expert, but if I'm correct, that encrypted string is for wpa_supplicant, which will turn it back to the password required by the wi-fi.

However the fix for today's install was to change the wi-fi password to plain text, run netplan generate and apply, then restart the wlan0 link. Now it works fine. Even if the yaml in /etc/netplan is only accessible to root, I don't really like this.

What went wrong and how can I fix this, going back to an encrypted password?

Las Ten
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1 Answers1

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This has nothing to do with wpa_supplicant.

The password can be in plain ASCII text or a 256-bit PSK formed from the SSID and passphrase which you can generate with the wpa_passphrase utility.
This is hashed, not strictly encryption although it is practically impossible to reconstruct the plain text password.

AFAIK the Imager does not configure Ubuntu, only Raspberry Pi OS.

It generates a text file containing configuration details which requires a program, included in Raspberry Pi OS, to set the necessary files. Last time I looked this only included dhcpcd & networkmanager settings.

Milliways
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