Bug 32062 - wpa_supplicant "randomly" chooses one of instances of chosen instances of SSID rather than the strongest.
Summary: wpa_supplicant "randomly" chooses one of instances of chosen instances of SSI...
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 23453
Alias: None
Product: Mageia
Classification: Unclassified
Component: RPM Packages (show other bugs)
Version: 8
Hardware: All Linux
Priority: Normal major
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Mageia Bug Squad
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Reported: 2023-06-30 17:56 CEST by w unruh
Modified: 2023-06-30 20:04 CEST (History)
0 users

See Also:
Source RPM: wpa_supplicant, network centre.
CVE:
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Description w unruh 2023-06-30 17:56:47 CEST
Description of problem:Using network center, wpa_supplicant appears to choose a random instance of a chosen SSID, rather than the strongest signal. For example, in a hotel, I got 8 instances of an SSID and almost each time wpa_supplicany chose one with a 20-40% signal strength rather than an 80-95% signal strength. Not surprisingly this made the connection extremely flaky.



Version-Release of selected component (if applicable):wpa_supplicant-2.10-2.mga8, 
drakx-net-2.55-1.mga8




How reproducible: Often. It of course needs a situation where there are lots od instances of the same SSID name with different BSSID instances, like a hotel or a university. In this case these were also passwordless BSSIDs as is often the case in hotels (they "protect" by demanding that you first open any web page, hijack the link and present you with a logon or room number request. But I have also seen the same behaviour with eduroam),

Now this is an advance on previous behaviour where wpa_supplicant would also randomly pick the SSID as well, but Malinen did fix that. While he has said that you can use wpa_cli to associate a specific BSSID with the SSID, the default behaviour of wpa_supplicant should be to choose the BSSID on the basis of signal strength, not randomly (or I suspect, the first SSID it sees when it scans).

One could use wpa_cli to scan, choose the strongest and then tell wpa_supplicant to use that, but this makes connection slower (two or three scans, instead of the one that wpa_supplicant does anyway).


Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1 sturmvogel 2023-06-30 20:04:32 CEST
Duplicate

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 23453 ***

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => DUPLICATE


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