Re: Two WLANs with the same SSID but different connection names

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2012-09-18 at 18:14 +0200, Alexander Karlstad wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've added two WLANs to my list in NM, both with the same SSID (eduroam) 
> but I've given them different names, e.g. «eduaroam (foo)» and «eduroam 
> (bar)». In nm-applet, «eduroam» appears, but with a sub list which shows 
> both «eduroam (foo)» and «eduroam (bar)»[1][2][3].

This is definitely nm-applet, and not the GNOME Shell applet, right?

> I took this as a sign that NM understood the difference between the two 
> networks (well, it's the same network, but different auth info), but 
> that doesn't seem to be the case. It only connects using the cridentials 
> from one of the connections (in my case, the «eduroam (foo)») regardless 
> of which of them I select.

Also, can you verify from /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemon.log (or
wherever the syslog daemon facility goes) that NM is actually only ever
activating the single connection even if you choose the other one?  NM
prints out exactly which connection it's starting in the logs.

Unfortunately there's no good way to autoselect which connection to use
here, because with WiFi the SSID *is* the network identifier.  And since
you're using a large campus network, you can't lock to a single BSSID.
So thanks to the (IMHO) network misconfiguration here, you're kinda
stuck choosing which connection to use manually.  Ideally they'd
configure the network so that if you authenticated correctly, all
resources are available.

Dan

> The reason for me having two different connections is that I have logins 
> for two different schools. When I'm at one of them, I need to use my 
> cridentials for that connection to get full access to network services 
> like SMTP, IMAP, SSH (to their servers) and so on. But when it only 
> seems to connect to the "wrong" eduroam, I get a different IP and don't 
> get access to what I need.
> 
> Now I ask – is this a bug in NM?
> 
> [1]: http://ubuntuone.com/1T2nTxtAyYjoMD64XFwkSx
> [2]: http://ubuntuone.com/3wm6iofl3RkjyBul39zRVF
> [3]: http://ubuntuone.com/46ycc6CrdJg43tKxHzsUl1
>