GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 660232
Wlan/Network-Connection essid keeps changing to asterisk "*"
Last modified: 2011-11-21 09:41:19 UTC
I experience a pretty annoying bug @Archlinux, which didn't happen at the beginning with Gnome 3.0, but now also appears after a full system reinstallation. On my laptop, the essid of my wlan-connection in the NetworkManager keeps changing to an asterisk ("*") which means I cannot connect to it. The only way I found to connect, is to execute "sudo network-manager-applet" from the terminal and change the essid back to the real value. (but as I said it keeps changing back to * afterwards) The essid is recognized correctly in the menu: http://i.imgur.com/nG1XI.png http://i.imgur.com/jveqL.png But it's wrong in my settings: http://i.imgur.com/z5lEA.png http://i.imgur.com/kncQF.png Please let me know if you need further information!
I've kind of solved this issue: I changed my SSID (from '42') to a value that only contains alphabetic characters and it works flawless now. The new networkmanager seems to have problems with SSIDs that only contain numbers. I didn't have this issue in 3.0, this bug appeared when testing the 3.2 (beta-)releases.
There is a problem with storing/reading SSIDs. The issue has been introduced after we allowed storing SSIDs without non-printable characters as strings instead of byte arrays. So we have two formats. Unfortunately, the two formats are not completely distinguishable for all cases. Numbers are one of those cases. E.g. 42 is taken as a byte and the character for that is '*'. Even if in this case we could figure out that '42' should be regarded as 2-character string '42' instead of '*' (else explicit '*' would be in the config), for numbers that represent non-printable characters we are clueless. E.g.: '13' - string value of '13' or one byte 'CR' ??? '65;66;67;9' - string value of '65;66;67;9' or ABC\t ??? So, we have to work out a way how to distinguish between strings x byte arrays. The thing is complicated by the fact we should maintain backwards compatibility in order to correctly parse older configs.
*** Bug 660845 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Had the same problem. Solved it by entering the BSSID in nm-connection-editor. This way, Network-Manager forget about the problem with the value of the ssid. This way, i could keep 42 for my bssid. By running nm-connection-editor in a terminal, i have the following error line : ** (nm-connection-editor:4313): WARNING **: Invalid setting Wireless: ssid
Fixed upstream: 965d5860ab35df3df586278dfba80fa89e30029a (master) 50e329a92fc34d3bdbf21b5104949ae0fbe3c8f0 (master)
*** Bug 664327 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***