wicd

"no wireless networks found" if >64 networks

Bug #1801751 reported by Anne Bennett on 2018-11-05

This bug affects 2 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	wicd	New	Medium	Guido Maria Serra

Bug Description

This is on a laptop running Slackware, with:

wicd-1.7.4-i586-2
wicd-kde-0.3.0_bcf27d8-i586-2

Quite often when I am attending a computer-related conference,
where there are many wireless networks available, in the "Wicd
Network Manager" window, "Refresh" returns "no wireless networks
found" as long as the count of available networks is over 64,
as reported by:

iw wlan0 scan | grep -wc SSID

When that count is below 64, a list of networks is displayed
in the window, and I can select one and connect.

I tested this by running:

  while true ; do
      date
      iw wlan0 scan | grep -wc SSID
      sleep 15
      done

in a terminal window, while repeatedly trying to "Refresh"
in the Wicd Network Manager" window.

Anne.

Revision history for this message

Guido Maria Serra (zeph1ro) wrote on 2019-08-09:

python-wicd 1.7.4+tb2-6+devuan1.1 Edit (2.2 KiB, text/plain)

hi, the bug relies in the wireless-tools package, wicd & python-wicd are just wrappers around them

I came up with a patch... basically asking all ESSIDs via (a different tool != iwlist) 'iw <if> scan' and then ask for each the data using the 'iwlist <if> scan'essid <essid>' to reduce the amount of entries returned per each call

I know, we could do better, but hey... it is a start... also, I need to find the ticket, but you'll find issues also with non-ascii characters in the ESSID... but that's another topic (might have something in my patch for it though)

happy to work more on it, but i'm not yet that comfortable
with the packaging/patching procedures (i need menthorship*)

*even RTFM of "not a long unreadable bible" is welcome

Revision history for this message

Guido Maria Serra (zeph1ro) wrote on 2019-08-09:

p.s. le sigh! :/

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900742

...I'm digging into Wireless Extensions kernel API

Guido Maria Serra (zeph1ro) on 2019-09-18

Changed in wicd:
importance:	Undecided → Medium
assignee:	nobody → Guido Maria Serra (zeph1ro)

Revision history for this message

Karl Grimm (kjgrimm) wrote on 2019-12-01:

Dear Guido,

THE SHORT VERSION:
==================
Thanks very much for the patch and your useful comments. I am wondering if you have succeeded in getting this working, or found another solution? I am using Ubuntu 16.04LTS with WICD, but I cannot get the patch to work.

THE LONG VERSION:
=================
This problem is of course getting worse and worse as the number of WiFi networks in the world keeps increasing. In most city areas, I simply cannot connect. And I assist many others to get connected over the phone, and they are having the same problem - no list of networks. They have to use WICD, as they are not capable of running commands in a Terminal (it's a long story). So I am keen to get WICD working.

I had a go at using your patch. I've never used the patch command before, but I figured out how to apply the patch, and it seems to have worked - the resultant file looks suitably different to the original. After I change wnettools.py, I restart WICD each time. After applying tha patch, WICD shows "scanning" forever. The WICD log file is indicating "Exception in thread". I added a few print statements to wnettols.py to try to narrow down the problem ....
m contains a nice list of SSID names (including a bunch of \\x00' for the 3rd SSID)
iwlist_cmd looks correct for the first two SSIDs

and I never see iwlist_cmd for the 3rd SSID

So I think I have come up against what you alrady predicted:
"you'll find issues also with non-ascii characters in the ESSID"

I am not a Python programmer, so that's about as far as I got.