How to switch back and forth between 2 WLANs, of which 1 hidden?

Question

In my (development) situation, I have 2 WLANs:

1. local with hidden SSID and no internet access.
2. not-hidden, with internet access.

I sometimes need to switch between them. Switch 1->2 is relatively easy, select the WIFI Icon and select the network.

However, switch 2->1 is troublesome, the hidden WLAN can not be found using the WIFI Icon. And worse, the wpa_supplicant.conf file has the hidden SSID disabled* for me, so even a reboot doesn't work unless I manually fix the config file.

Is there an easy solution to this? (Or should I write some script that restores the wpa_supplicant.conf and restarts the service?)

---

PS.* with disabled, I mean in my wpa_supplicant.config:

disabled=1

And with hidden, that I had to say:

scan_ssid=1

Other information in the wpa_supplicant file is the sensitive part with passwords and network names.

As I say in my comments, I was looking for a more 'user friendly' way of executing 'wpa_cli enable 0 && wpa_cli reconnect 0'.

Answer 1

If you use wpa_cli you can use for example this script for a more 'user friendly' way ?

#!/bin/bash
# switchnetwork.sh

LOCALNET=0
EXTERNALNET=1    

function switch_to_local_net(){
      echo "SWITCHING TO NETWORK ID $LOCALNET"
      wpa_cli enable $LOCALNET && wpa_cli reconnect $LOCALNET
}
function switch_to_external_net(){
      echo "SWITCHING TO NETWORK ID $EXTERNALNET"
      wpa_cli enable $EXTERNALNET && wpa_cli reconnect $EXTERNALNET
}

case $1 in
     LOCAL|local) switch_to_local_net ; exit 0;;
     EXTERNAL|external) switch_to_external_net ; exit 0;;
     *) echo "Sorry arguments are: LOCAL or EXTERNAL";;
esac

exit 1

Now you can use this script in a terminal like this:

sudo bash switchnetwork.sh LOCAL

or

sudo bash switchnetwork.sh EXTERNAL

You can also put the bash script into /usr/bin/ directory (or other directory present in your $PATH environment variable) to can call switchnetwork without the script path.

Answer 2

I don't know how to show a hidden WLAN network with the WiFi Icon. I think it's by definition not to show it. But another main problem seems to be that wpa_supplicant modifies its configuration in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. By default it has an option update_config=1 set that exactly allows modification and to disable a network section with option disabled=1. You can avoid modifications by just setting update_config=0. Then wpa_supplicant will never modify its configuration.