Re: A bit more on Bookworm and WiFi problens

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

A power cut this a.m had my Pi zero W reconnecting to the  wrong wifi.
 
Which forced me to delve into the depths of network manager as evinced
by nmcli. Network manager is the new way to manage networks, and like
systemd, its all changed for the sake of it
 
You probably can edit the files directly - mine were in
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections, but it's safer to use nmcli tools
 
 
You can set a priority if you have more than one wifi SSID.
 
sudo nmcli c modify <connection name>  connection.autoconnect-priority 1
 
You can also force it to use 5Ghz or 2.4Ghz or let it decide
 
sudo nmcli c modify <connection name> 802-11-wireless.band "bg"
 
or
 
sudo nmcli c modify <connection name> 802-11-wireless.band "a"
 
 
"bg" is 2.4GHz, "a" is 5GHz.
 
It may well be that bookworm has changed the implicit defaults in
network manager.
 
It is well worth dumping the connections with
 
sudo nmcli connection show <connection name>
 
To work out what the connection names are, use
 
sudo nmcli c show
 
I think - but am not sure - that you can set more stuff through the
command line than through the GUI interface to network manager
 
 

After a bit more fumbling two new wrinkles emerged. One was a report
of wifi being turned off by rfkill. This happened once before, and
re-setting the locale options seemed to fix it. This time re-establishing
the locale had no detectable effect.

After a bit more fumbling it appears that the wifi connects readily
when the wired ethernet is also connected. Maybe that's significant,
but exactly how isn't apparent to me.

Thanks for posting the hints on using nmcli!

bob prohaska