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wifiroamd is a background program which tries to just do the right thing to bring up your wireless network. Simple yet customizable init.d-like scripts are used to determine which networks are preferred and do things like set the ESSID or WEP keys. Other advanced functionality such as bonding of wired and wireless devices is also automated.

wifiroamd is an engine for the handling of connecting to wireless networks. It is entirely command-line based, and configuration is done by creating simple init.d-like scripts. There is no GUI available, but wifiroamd would make a great engine running behind such a GUI tool.

The primary goal of wifiroamd is to make such GUI tools (nearly) obsolete. wifiroamd is meant to run in the background and just do the right thing, without requiring attention from the user.


wifiroamd requires a wireless device which supports scanning. Try running the command "iwlist DEV scan", where "DEV" is your wireless device. If it shows a list of wireless access points, you should be good to go. If your wireless device reports "Scanning not supported" (or similar), wifiroamd cannot be used.


Getting started

There are packages for RPM and dpkg based distributions. The base source includes the files necessary to build packages on both package systems. Install the appropriate package for your distribution.

Create "connection" scripts for any APs that have special needs or which you prefer to connect to. The preferred method is using the MAC address of the wireless access point, but you may also use the ESSID. These scripts exist in "/etc/wifiroamd/connections" and are named either "mac:<MAC ADDRESS>" or "essid:<ENCODED ESSID>". ESSIDs have non-alphanumeric characters encoded using HTTP URL encoding. For example, space is represented as %20, where space is ASCII character 32, which is hexadecimal 20.

In the simple case, these scripts can just be empty. Their presence marks that MAC or ESSID as being preferred. They can also specify things like DHCP, bring up the interface with a static IP, bonding, WEP, etc... See the example scripts under "/usr/share/doc/wifiroamd/examples" for some samples.

Now start wifiroamd with "/etc/init.d/wifiroamd start".



Recent changes



wifiroamd is released under the GPL.


wifiroamd (source, binaries, report formats, documentation and all related matter) is copyright © 2006 Sean Reifschneider,, ltd.