Re: Feature request: Blacklist BSSID or MAC address

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 15:25 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> Our campus wireless network has several dozen access points scattered
> around campus.  From where I sit in my office, I can see about a dozen
> or so.  Frequently, NM (or the driver) selects an AP with a relatively
> weak signal (to the point of being unusable), even though I sit across
> the hall from a much stronger one.

This would be a supplicant or driver problem and should probably be
solved there.  The supplicant should be ordering the scan list by best
signal strength already anyway.  The driver may also roam between APs
without interaction with NM or the supplicant.

> I don't want to bind the configuration to a single BSSID, because I do
> move around the campus and I want to be able to connect wherever I am.
> But I do want to blacklist the weak APs near my office, so I don't have
> to force reassociation (which seems to require power-cycling my wireless
> interface).
> 
> I don't see a way to do that in the pull-down Edit Connections menu.  Is
> it possible to add such a feature?  Or should I be asking for something
> else to deal with this issue?  (For example, is it a driver bug?)

Yeah, it's either a driver or supplicant issue first; there's simply not
a way to blacklist a specific BSSID at levels lower than NM yet.  Have
you run 'iwlist' when you notice you're on a "bad" AP and looked at the
relative signal strengths of the reported APs to see how bad the one
you're on really is?

We could modify the supplicant to never select certain APs, and then
we'd also have to modify the driver to ensure that it never
automatically roamed to those APs as well.  That's probably not possible
with WEXT, but should be with the newer wireless driver API (cfg80211).

Dan