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

[William Kenworthy]

On 5/4/22 16:05, Michael wrote:
> On Tuesday, 5 April 2022 08:46:52 BST Neil Bothwick wrote:
>> On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 11:16:10 +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Could you run two instances of wpa_suplicant, each listening on a
>> different interface and using a config with only the AP for that
>> interface?
> As I recall wpa_cli can be launched by specifying a particular interface.
> Therefore two instances of wpa_cli launched by a script should be possible.
>
> However, isn't the purpose of /etc/conf.d/net to specify how individual
> interfaces are configured?  I still think - but have not tried it - each
> wireless NIC can be configured via this file to use a particular access point/
> channel and not go scanning for others, while the wpa_supplicant can be left
> to deal with the authentication mechanism after each NIC has found its
> specified ESSID.
>
> The section in the netifrc example file which starts as follows, merits
> reading:
>
> ###############################################
> # SETTINGS
> # Hard code an SSID to an interface - leave this unset if you wish the driver
> # to scan for available Access Points . . .
>
> Something like this ought to work:
>
> essid_wlan0="foo"
>
> essid_wlan1="bar"

Didnt work - what did work was setting up the main network using normal 
openrc and scripting the other interface after making it 
config_wlan1="null" in conf.d/net.  I am putting this part of the 
problem as solved.  Routing is still an issue but once I have a couple 
of diagnostic packages installed (compiling is slow on a pi!) I will be 
better able to see whats gone wrong.

BillK