static Wifi connection

[Jörn Clausen <joernc%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Hi!

I have a NetBSD box as gateway between my DSL router and the rest of
my network. At the moment, it uses a NIC which connects to a Netgear
WNCE2001 (an "access point in client mode", for want of a better
description), and everything works fine.

I would like to get rid of the ageing Netgear hardware and instead use
the built-in Wifi adapter of the machine. It is an Intel 3165 which is
recognized as

iwm0: hw rev 0x210, fw ver 22.361476.0, address 9c:da:3e:e0:60:6e
iwm0: 11a rates: 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
iwm0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
iwm0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps
24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps

I have /etc/ifconfig.iwm0 with

ssid FOOBAR

and /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf with

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
        priority=99
        ssid="FOOBAR"
        bssid=f0:7d:68:b2:e8:10
        psk="sharedsecret"
}

When I do

$ wpa_supplicant -s -i iwm0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

the adapter connects (sometimes it takes two or three tries), and I
assign the IP address from my DSL router with

$ dhcpcd -C resolv.conf iwm0

When I put exactly the same values in /etc/rc.conf, it doesn't work.
One problem seems to be, that the wpa_supplicant phase takes to long
and dhcpcd gives up. I see

Aug  1 12:42:58 gw2 wpa_supplicant[233]: iwm0: Authentication with
f0:7d:68:b2:e8:10 timed out.
Aug  1 12:42:58 gw2 wpa_supplicant[233]: iwm0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED
bssid=f0:7d:68:b2:e8:10 reason=3 locally_generated=1
Aug  1 12:42:58 gw2 wpa_supplicant[233]: iwm0:
CTRL-EVENT-SSID-TEMP-DISABLED id=0 ssid="FOOBAR" auth_failures=1
duration=10 reason=CONN_FAILED

What does "reason=3" mean? This seems to puzzle many people in other
fora as well.

dhcpcd(8) mentions that you should copy
/usr/share/examples/dhcpcd/hooks/10-wpa_supplicant to
/libexec/dhcpcd-hooks, but that didn't change anything for me. Or is
the idea to not start wpa_supplicant from rc.conf and leave this step
to dhcpcd?

Another problem seems to be, that once the iwm0 interface was up and
is taken down, the association with the SSID is lost. As a
consequence, wpa_supplicant tends to connect to other open APs in my
neighbourhood. I /think/ I catered for this with the "priority=99" in
the config, but I am not sure and it is a hack.

Any ideas how to fix this and get a reliable static Wifi connection?

-- 
Joern Clausen
https://www.oe-files.de/photography/