GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 571524
NM-Applet no longer connects after extended use on a roaming ESSID
Last modified: 2020-11-12 14:34:21 UTC
I'm at a university where one ESSID is used across hundreds of APs that provide connectivity to the campus. (In case it matters, the authentication is WPA Enterprise, TTLS with PAP.) NetworkManager worked very well the first few weeks I used it to connect to the network. After about a month, nm-applet would refuse to connect to the network, instead repeatedly asking for the username and password, hanging for a while, and then failing (going back to the icon with an X). I figured that I must have misconfigured something, but nothing that I tried to change or reinstall worked. Finally I went into the Network Manager Editor and deleted the entry for the ESSID. I noticed that the list of MAC addresses was very, very long. After I deleted this and connected to the network again, it worked instantly. Perhaps there is a length limit on this field or the linear search through it is taking a long time, which is the reason that the connection is failing. If I could provide any additional evidence in this situation, please let me know. It will probably take another couple of weeks roaming around campus for the problem to pop up again.
I can attest to similar behavior in a similar environment. I have an access point right outside my office door, with others in the viscinity with the same ESSID. (For what it's worth, out network requires WPA2 Enterprise with PEAP and MSCHAPv2.) Connection quality fluctuates wildly, even when I am the only one in the building, and my notebook and the access points are quite stationary. It will often disconnect and attempt to reconnect, sometimes failing. I do not know if I am looking at the same list of MAC addresses that mizzao@gmail.com was referring to, but in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/[connection-name] there is the following entry: seen-bssids=[one MAC address];[a second MAC address] The first address there is the one currently serving my notebook.
bugzilla.gnome.org is being shut down in favor of a GitLab instance. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use NetworkManager and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and supported version of NetworkManager, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/issues/ Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (workforce and time is unfortunately limited).