Connect to specific access point by MAC?

[Smith, Bruce]

You can distinguish connections by either bssid or ssid, in your case you only need the bssid.  Just configure the networks in the wpa_supplicant configuration file.  If you change the file on the file you can send a reconfigure to the supplicant via wpa_cli.  If you want even more dynamic access, build your own program to communicate over the control socket and establish networks on the fly without the config file.  Either way works, I prefer using the control channel if there are lots of dynamic changes.
 
Seems like  you might need to get the scan results and pick the one you want to associate so you can exclude the mac of  your local AP.  I'm assuming all your SSIDs are the same.  
 
One other method that might work.  If you stick your local AP information in the configuration file with bssid of your local AP in one network config and another network config with just the SSID but with higher priority, it shouldn't select your local one unless there are no APs in range.
 
Cheers,
Bruce

________________________________

From: hostap-bounces+bsmith=road-inc.com at shmoo.com on behalf of William Pettersson
Sent: Wed 7/25/2007 4:27 AM
To: hostap at shmoo.com
Subject: Connect to specific access point by MAC?



First off, sorry to the list maintainer.  I send this email a few days
ago from the wrong email address, and it got that "this list is
moderated email"

Ok, I've been tasked with setting up a number of embedded devices to
broadcast a wireless network, with a fibre backbone and a redundant
wireless link between nodes for redundancy.

Each "node" has two atheros cards in it, so unless I'm mistaken, each
card will simply connect to the most powerful card it can find, which
will be its mate in the same enclosure.  Even if it does connect to an
external "node", I can't have them connecting to any node as this may
cause a loss

To get around this, I'll need to specify which MAC address to connect to
I guess.  I'm open to other ideas, but I can't think of any other way
around this.

Is this something that can be set up using wpa_supplicant?  I'm assuming
that I cannot just "iwconfig ath1 ap aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff" as
wpa_supplicant will change what I set.

William

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