If you’re here to find out how to setup network connection to hidden wifi access point, you might want to check this post: How to Connect to Hidden Wifi Using nmcli instead.
This post documents how I fix an issue of wifi connection on a laptop running Gentoo to a hidden access point. The problem is that the wifi connection doesn’t automatically connect despite I’ve set the autoconnect.connection yes.
❯ nmcli con show CamBlue | grep -i autoconnect
connection.autoconnect: yes
connection.autoconnect-priority: 0
connection.autoconnect-retries: -1 (default)
connection.autoconnect-slaves: -1 (default)
I don’t remember having done anything special on the Fedora laptops connecting to the same the network; and this problem didn’t exit on any of those Fedora machines at all.
Well, tonight I spotted something interesting relating to a property 802-11-wireless.hidden.
❯ nmcli con show CamBlue | grep -i hidden
802-11-wireless.hidden: no
802-11-wireless-security.wep-key0: <hidden>
802-11-wireless-security.wep-key1: <hidden>
802-11-wireless-security.wep-key2: <hidden>
802-11-wireless-security.wep-key3: <hidden>
802-11-wireless-security.psk: <hidden>
802-11-wireless-security.leap-password: <hidden>
At that point, I didn’t know that by setting the 802-11-wireless.hidden: yes would fix it either. But it was worth a try. So let’s set it to yes.
❯ sudo nmcli con mod CamBlue 802-11-wireless.hidden yes
At this point the network connection just auto connect. I’m pretty happy that this issue is finally solved and I learned something new today with NetworkManager tool. I don’t have access to my Fedora machine at the moment, so I’m not sure what value the 802-11-wireless.hidden property is set.
The version of NetworkManager running on this machine is 1.26.0-r1.
net-misc/networkmanager: 1.26.0-r1
Update (2020-12-30):
I checked the setting of Wifi’s connection on Fedora 33 laptop, and, indeed, 802-11-wireless.hidden property is set to yes.