What is UUID of a wifi network?

Question

From https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/158747/674,

First, run
nmcli c
This will list your connections, with the first column being the SSID, and the second column being the UUID of the connection.

In its manpage and google, I don't find the differences between UUID, ESSID and BSSID of a network. What are their differences? Thanks.

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 04 '21 at 08:43

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First result

The ESSID is what is transmitted and what you "see" this is what you will normally connect to for example "Joe's Wi-Fi". As you can guess, I can have five networks called "Joe's Wi-Fi".

The BSSID is the MAC address associated with the Access Point (AP). It is hardware set and should be unique. So of those five "Joe's Wi-Fi" networks, each AP will have it's own BSSID. You can alter your AP's MAC address.

From that first result: "ESSID is another way to identify the network." which is a bit vague; however, hopefully the diagram will help:

_{(source: juniper.net)}

UUID is just a unique ID number. There are not supposed two of the same value.

edited Mar 04 '21 at 08:43

Glorfindel

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answered May 05 '15 at 01:05

SailorCire

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Thanks. But still not understand relation and differences between UUID and ESSID/BSSID of a network – Tim May 05 '15 at 01:07
@Tim the only time I've seen UUID used in networking is with /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-ethX. – SailorCire May 05 '15 at 01:07

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

The ESSID of a wifi network is its human-friendly name. It usually identifies the network in order to distinguish it from other wifi networks that may be in range, but it's up to the administrator to choose a meaningful and unique name or not.

The BSSID of a wifi network is its machine-friendly name. It is normally unique (but may not be if the wifi provider is malicious).

See Wikipedia and SailorCire's answer for more information.

The UUID mentioned here is not a concept related to wifi networks. It's a concept of Network Manager, the program that you're using. Network Manager assigns a unique machine-friendly name (in the form of a UUID) to each connection. A connection, in this context, is a set of configuration parameters that describe the network (its name, its credentials, etc.). Connections also have human-friendly names; the UUID is used to tell apart connections that have the same human-friendly names.

Thanks. Is BSS different from ESS? Is ESS a union of more than one BSSes? — Tim, May 06 '15 at 03:16

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 30 '17 at 12:42

UUID stands for "universally unique identifier". This is not only used in Wifi/Network configurations.

The article UUIDs and Linux: Everything you ever need to know seems a good one to understand what actually this is.

Then, networking in particular, this answer explains the usage.

What is UUID of a wifi network?

3 Answers3