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

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2012-09-19 at 16:47 +0200, Alexander Karlstad wrote:
> Den 19. sep. 2012 14:23, skrev Marius Kotsbak:
> > Does the same happen if you remove autoconnect for both of them? Maybe
> > NM always autoconnect to the first one.
> 
> Turning off autoconnect to both networks actually did the trick. Still, 
> that means the autoconnect option overrides my manual selection. Not cool.

NM will autoconnect to a network that (a) has autoconnect selected, (b)
shows up in a scan result, and (c) matches the connection attributes.

So, if you have two networks with the same SSID and both use WPA/WPA2,
then NM will select the *last used* connection.  Because, for all NM
knows (and a lot of other wifi managers too) they are the same network
because they use the same SSID and same security type.  It's pretty bad
network planning to use the same SSID for actually different networks.

So your options are to either lock the connection to a single AP's
BSSID, and leave autoconnect on, which will work all the time that
single AP is found, or to manually connect.  Obviously this breaks
roaming, but that's apparently not a concern to the network engineers at
this location.

Alternatively, if one set of APs only uses WPA1, and the other set uses
WPA2, then we have a chance to automatically connecting to them *and*
roaming, because there's a way to distinguish the network.  Still bad
network planning, but possible to work around.

Dan