Arch Linux

flix

Member

Registered: 2012-09-08

Posts: 6

Autoconnect to strongest configured WLAN

Hi,

i'm searching for a command line program where I can define
some wifi networks and let the machine automatically connect
to the strongest one from that list. If connection gets lost it should
cycle through the list and find the next one with the strongest signal.

Anybody knows a tool for that or do I need to write one by myself?

Thx!

unifiedlinux

Member

Registered: 2012-11-03

Posts: 20

Re: Autoconnect to strongest configured WLAN

Hello,

i think netcfg's "net-auto-wireless" does that by default, it scans for known networks and connects to one of them (i don't know if it's based on signal strength though, but other than that it does exactly what you want, it can automatically reconnect to any known network as soon as the connection is lost).

Have a nice day.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Autoconnect to strongest configured WLAN

unifiedlinux is correct.  Netcfg's net-auto-wireless will handle this.  You just need to have wpa_actiond and rfkill in addition to netcfg (and of course your configs set up correctly).  It is actually just a wrapper script around some commonly used networking tools.

I think that wicd will also handle this functionality as well.  I used to use this, but dumped it in favor of netcfg a while back.  If you install only the wicd package, there is no gui tool.  The tray icon/gui is in a package called wicd-gtk, so if you only have the wicd package, you can use wicd-curses which works pretty great actually.  There is als the wicd-cli utility, which I have only used a little, but seems to offer more than enough in versatility to be functional.

Edit: I think Trilby uses a tool he created himself to connect to wireless networks.  I am not sure if it contains the functionality in which you seek, but I did try it for basic single network usage, and it worked well.

Last edited by WonderWoofy (2012-12-26 18:35:12)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,491

Website

Re: Autoconnect to strongest configured WLAN

Edit: I think Trilby uses a tool he created himself to connect to wireless networks.  I am not sure if it contains the functionality in which you seek.

Nope, it certainly doesn't.  It's just a wrapper for the manual steps with no daemon or other such thing.  So if the connection goes out, it goes out.  Netcfg or Wicd would seem to be the way to go for auto reconnecting.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-12-26 18:40:40)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman