Auto-connection seems cumbersome when SSID broadcast is turned off.

["Geoff Buchan" <geoffrey buchan gmail com>]

Hi all -

Apologies if this topic has come up before. I tried searching the list and didn't see any discussion of it.

I'm using NetworkManager and the nm-applet v0.6.6 on Ubuntu, and it is frequently slow to find my wireless network at home when I resume from suspend-to-RAM. Sometimes it finds the network and connects almost immediately, but at other times it may take minutes to see the network. What's interesting is that if I manually click "Connect to Other Wireless Network" and retype my encryption key, it does find the network right away. But if I simply wait, or click on the applet to prod a network scan, it often takes quite a while to connect, or I get tired of waiting, so I manually type in the connection information.

With an older laptop running Slackware (but not NetworkManager), I simply wrote a shell script to try to connect to my home network on resume, but that seems a crude hack on this newer box. If I enable SSID broadcast on my router, it connects promptly, but I like wearing my tin foil hat, and it seems there should be a more elegant solution.

The nm-applet could automatically try the most recently used connection first (and perhaps cycle through other connections in least recently used order), but then you would have some timeout after which you'd give up and try the next one. Alternatively, I could add a "connect" button to the properties of the "Edit Wireless Networks" window, which would try to connect with those settings, irrespective of whether it currently "sees" that network or not. Assuming that is the equivalent of manually entering the SSID and encryption key, that would solve the issue I'm seeing.

Am I missing some other already present configuration option that would accomplish this? Is there some design reason why either of the two suggestions I made would be inappropriate? If not, I'll try hack up a patch to get one of them working.

Regards,

Geoff Buchan