Autoconnect to WiFi not working

General Help
1

I have setup a Zorin OS 16 and everything works so far pretty neat.
My only problem is that I have difficulties in connecting to a hidden WiFi (5GHz only) that is meshed using four devolo Magic 2 devices.

Manually it is no problem to connect and using a 2.4 GHz network from a mobile router is working, as well as connecting with the same MacBook running MacOS.

"lspci" output looks good to me:
lspci -knn | grep Net -A3; rfkill list
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43a0] (rev 03)

  • Subsystem: Apple Inc. BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [106b:0117]*
  • Kernel driver in use: wl*
  • Kernel modules: bcma, wl*

so does "lshw -class network":
**-network *

  •   description: Wireless interface*

  •   product: BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter*

  •   vendor: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries*

  •   physical id: 0*

  •   bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0*

  •   logical name: wlp3s0*

  •   version: 03*

  •   serial: 9c:f3:87:bd:a7:00*

  •   width: 64 bits*

  •   clock: 33MHz*

  •   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless*

  •   configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.271 (r587334) ip=192.168.2.196 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11*

  •   resources: irq:18 memory:b0600000-b0607fff memory:b0400000-b05fffff*

I did fire out the reinstall of the kernel drivers that seem to get lost from time to time, but that didnt do the trick either:
apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source

And I turned of the power management, just to prevent anything going south through that using iwconfig:
*wlp3s0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"XXYYZZXXYYZZ" *

  •      Mode:Managed  Frequency:5.18 GHz  Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX   *

  •      Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off*

  •      Power Management:off*

Any ideas on how to look at this further?

2

Sorry for the errors with the formatting of the text...

3

Hidden networks don't broadcast their ssid. It is used as a type of authentication. Most os's will not be able to autoconnect to this type of network because of this. You could have one of the repeaters offer an ssid with a tough password. It's one of those things that you would either have to write a script for (including the ssid and password) or make your network visible.

Hiding a network offers a level of obfuscation, but not much in the way of security. It is still listed as an entry in any devices connection list, but without the ssid. This is better suited for server or printer connections than for regular use by average user connections

4

Thanks mate and sure, but I should connect nonetheless.

It is certainly not big security gain to hide the SSID, but nonetheless I cannot imagine that the 5.11 Kernel would have this problems.

This does work on a almost identical machine (with a slightly older Broadcom WiFi Module) under Kernel 5.8 and 5.12 using the Ubuntu 21.10 release.

So I thought it should be possible to get it connected without running a script.

5

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