Re: How to Autoconnect Two WiFi Cards?

[James Prestwood <prestwoj@gmail.com>]

Hi Fabian,

On 1/16/24 8:48 AM, Fabian Herb wrote:
> Dear iwd users and developers,
>
> I have a setup with two identical Intel AX210 WiFi cards. I want to connect each to a different SSID. Automatically if possible. But I can’t figure out a way to do that. Even if I connect each one to their network manually, the next time the signal is lost and a card reconnects, there is a good chance that it connects to the wrong network again.
>
> There is no option in the network configuration files to limit a network to a certain interface as far as I can see. I also tried running two instances of iwd, each with a different „—phys“ parameter and STATE_DIRECTORY variable. But the second instance fails with „Name request failed“ (something D-Bus-related?). I also can’t see a way to tell iwctl to which iwd instance to connect to. I also tried using NetworkManager to control iwd, but that worked even worse.
>
> So how can I force each WiFi card on a different SSID? One of the SSIDs is on 2.4 GHz and the other is on 5 GHz. Does that help somehow?

You can't easily force this in general. IWD doesn't have any 
user-configurable network priority, it just picks the "best" network. 
Nor does it have per-phy network profiles which is really what you want 
here.

Without implementing a new feature with per-phy profiles about the only 
thing you could do would be:

  - Create a network namespace (e.g. ns0)

  - Move one of the phys into ns0

  - Start dbus in ns0

  - Start IWD in ns0 (specifying a different state and/or config directory)

And you'd of course have to deal with the routing to actually get 
traffic passed between namespaces and your host.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish by connecting to separate SSID's?

Thanks,

James

>
> Thanks in advance!
> Fabian