Re: [gentoo-user] Choose a wireless access point

[William Kenworthy]

On 5/4/22 07:09, Michael wrote:
> On Monday, 4 April 2022 16:12:53 BST Jack wrote:
>> On 4/4/22 01:31, William Kenworthy wrote:
>>> Is there a way force openrc and wpa_supplicant to map a particular
>>> access point to an interface or fail?
>>>
>>> I have two AP's (each on a different ssid) to connect to so have two
>>> wifi interfaces - unfortunately they are not equal so I want wlan0 to
>>> connect to only one particular AP, and wlan1 to the other ... reliably!
>>> I can manually force it to connect but invariably at the first glitch
>>> they both end up connected to the same AP (usually the strongest which
>>> is often not what I want :(
>>>
>>> BillK
>> I don't know about wpa-supplicant, but I'm using open-rc and KDE, and
>> KDE's systemsettings Network / Connections screen lets you restrict a
>> network connection so a specific device.  Not sure if this helps you
>> any, but it would indicate that what you want is possible.
>>
>> Jack
> Look at the example provided in:
>
> /usr/share/doc/netifrc-0.7.3/net.example.bz2
>
> You can set a different ssid for each wireless NIC.  The wpa_supplicant can be
> set with credentials for the two APs only.

Unfortunately, this does not work as I want ...wpa_supplicant's 
behaviour makes sense in that it provides a fallback if the allocated 
access point cant connect ... it will pick the next available one 
(seemingly based on signal strength) if it is in its conf file (and does 
not care that its another ssid) - so it does not fail.  As only one of 
the two networks has internet access the device often ends up not being 
able to be connected to (its headless so that's a problem!).

I have fallen back to openrc for the main connection and will do the 
other manually - it would be nice to have everything properly controlled 
but its not working for me.

BillK