Re: MAC address randomization prevents connecting to some wifi AP

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2017-05-09 at 12:21 +0200, Thomas Haller wrote:
> On Sun, 2017-05-07 at 16:18 +0200, Julien Cubizolles wrote:
> > Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com> writes:
> >
> >
> > > From the logfile it's not clear why it would fail. There is also
> > > no
> > > <warn> message about NM being unable to change the MAC address --
> > > which
> > > I would expect to see when the driver cannot change the MAC
> > > address.
> > > But then it's unclear why you say "wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no"
> > > fixes
> > > the issue.
> > >
> > > You'd have to enable level=TRACE logging , see 
> > >   https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/plai
> > > n/
> > > contrib/fedora/rpm/NetworkManager.conf?id=master
> >
> > I enabled logging and now have a 3000+ lines file and I don't know
> > what
> > parts are relevant. It's too big for paste.bin so please find it
> > as a gzipped attachment.
>
> Hi,
>
> The logfile shows that you didn't disable MAC address randomization
> during activation. Ok, that is helpful to see that NM is able to
> change
> the MAC address. So, if it's related to MAC address randomization,
> it's
> either a supplicant or a driver bug.

Just to follow up on this, Julien and I were also talking on linux-
wireless@.  He said:

"I have my wifi AP set to only accept a whitelist of MAC addresses so
it makes sense that I can't connect if the MAC address is random."

So yeah, he's MAC filtering, and randomization should be disabled.

Dan

> -- note, your AP might be configured to filter by MAC address. But
> since you configured cloned-mac-address=permanent, that doesn't seem
> to
> be problem either. "wifi.scan-rand-mac-address" only matters while
> scanning. That should not matter while associating (where
> "wifi.cloned-
> mac-address" comes into play).
>
> From the logfile it is not clear what the problem is. It doesn't seem
> to be related to changing the MAC address (as the original email
> claims). But even if that would be the case, it would be easy to rule
> out by configuring NM not to ever change the MAC address. Since you
> apparently tried to do that (without fixing your issue), it seems
> that
> MAC address randomization is the problem.
>
> I would still suggest you disable MAC address randomization to rule
> that out and dig more.
>
> Look at the logfiles from supplicant
>  ( https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/NetworkManager/Debugging#Debugging
> _WiFi_Connections ).
>
>
> Best,
> Thomas
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