Re: Feature request: Blacklist BSSID or MAC address

[Matthew Saltzman <mjs clemson edu>]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 07:04 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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).

OK I will keep an eye on this with that in mind and post to the
supplicant bug list when I have enough data to make it worthwhile.

Thanks.

> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs