2007-08-12

Telling Network Manager to prefer home AP?

I'm running Network Manager on my Ubuntu laptop. It's a really neat tool when it comes to selecting an open wireless network when traveling, but it has one major flaw: you cannot tell it to prefer some "homebase" among a swarm of available Access Points; it insists upon using the first AP it finds, regardless. Has anyone figured out a solution to this common situation?

Meanwhile, the OpenVPN front-end that Network Manager offers only covers a fraction of available parameters, which means that I cannot use it to connect to my dayjob's LAN from outside the company, because the few Windows clients we have connecting to it expect a VPN to work in a specific way and cannot adapt to non-Microsoft approaches to VPN concept, which means that we Ubuntu users are the ones who have to adapt. Thus, the OpenVPN front-end would need to be able to configure MTU, MSS and other arbitrary parameters supported by OpenVPN. Looking at various BTS, I notice that I'm not the only one who needs this. Are Network Manager developers listening? :-)

2 comments:

Steev Klimaszewski said...

The way NetworkManager works is it checks the ESSID and BSSIDs. If you've connected to a network before, and it sees it in the area with a stronger signal, thats the one it connects to.

As for the OpenVPN things, I believe a lot of its shortcomings are due to some people simply NOT having a VPN available to them (nor wanting to set one up) in order to test and get it working.

Steev Klimaszewski said...

Oh, and I forgot to mention - it stores the SSIDs in gconf, so if you want it to connect to yours, remove all the entries for APs that are near you that you've connected to before :)