Re: Problem with changing encryption for established connection

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 13:09 +0000, Graham Lyon wrote:
> 2009/10/26 Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
>         
>         I made that work at one point, so that if you did switch from
>         WEP to WPA
>         it would just ask and you send the new settings.  But at some
>         point I
>         think that became obsolete, because NM won't even try to
>         connect to your
>         AP if the connection is WEP, but the AP is WPA; this filtering
>         was
>         requested mainly for people with 'linksys' default-ssid APs
>         where say
>         their neighbor was running one with WEP + 'linksys', but the
>         one they
>         connected to was WPA or something.
> 
> 
> I'm curious about this. Are people with that model of router simply
> unable to change their SSID then? If not, surely if their neighbor's
> SSID is the same as theirs and this is causing them issues then the
> correct course of action would be to change their SSID and not cause
> everyone to lose what I personally think is an essential piece of
> functionality. Changing of encryption methods is actually quite common
> (no, I'm not saying it's done every day but it's certainly not
> unexpected behavior). 

I believe there are some vendors where you can't change the SSID, or
where you aren't given access to the web interface to reconfigure.
These are mainly specific ISP devices that the ISP locks down and sends
out with "self-install" kits or whatever.

The other complication is APs that use the same BSSID but two different
SSIDs, which some Cisco devices do.  There's a "public" network that
broadcasts its SSID, and a private network with encryption that's hidden
and does not broadcast the SSID.  The same BSSID is used for both, but
they have different security settings.

Thus, we'd have to check the scan list before popping up that dialog
(asking for new security settings) to ensure that there was only one
other AP with that BSSID, ie the new one with new security.

Dan