On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 15:23 -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
Can the wifi portion of network manager be instructed to ignore particular SSID strings, in particular, "xfinity"? Here in Portland Oregon, many businesses, nonprofits, and individuals offer open wifi free to the public. My own access point broadcasts "www.personaltelco.net" like dozens of others in the Portland area, but there are thousands of open WAPs, with thousands of different SSIDs. Internet provider Comcast gives wireless access points to their customers configured with the SSID "xfinity", which allows comcast customers to use each other's wifi, but this "service" is not available to the general public, nor would privacy-savvy users want to be tracked by Comcast if it was. Indeed, offering open wifi service to the general public violates Comcast's service contract. However, if xfinity is the strongest non-WEP/WPA beacon in a previously-unvisited location, that is the SSID network manager wifi attaches to first. After all, it tried and succeeded before, with a different xfinity beacon. Much fumbling and gnashing of teeth to find a different open network, while network manager repeatedly interrupts the manual search and connects to xfinity again, like a yellowjacket wasp to a picnic.
I don't understand this. NetworkManager only connects to Wi-Fis for which you have a connection profile configured, i.e. if you connected to that network previously. If you don't use xfinity, why do you have a NetworkManager connection for it? Maybe you should just delete that connection?
So, is there an easy way to create a list of SSIDs that network manager should always ignore? I haven't found another internet provider that I dislike as much as Comcast, but it is prudent to allow for more than one.
No, this cannot be done. Unless you have a connection configured, the UI only shows you potential Wi-Fis from the scan result. So, for the one part, you ask for a way to hide certain SSID's in the UI. Another thing is, say you have Wi-Fi with a certain SSID and your neighbor uses the same SSID. So you probably only want to connect to your network, but not to your neighbors. Currently to only mechanism to do that is setting the BSSID of your connection. This however fails if you have multiple access points and you want to connect to some but not to others. Thomas
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