wpa_supplicant auto reconnect

[Jake Magee]

It did attempt a connection later... I don't remember if it was one or
two more times.  However, after those failures it stopped trying.  I
let it set for over 20 minutes in the area with the known good AP and
it never connected back up automatically.  However, as soon as I
executed the wpa_cli reconfigure (or maybe it was reassociate) it
connected up just fine.  The problem is that this will be a headless
remote system that I need to automatically attempt reconnecting.

I don't have bgscan set explicitly (not sure what the default is).
I'll try playing with this value and see what how that affects things.
I do know that it will reconnect to the good AP if I take it down for
a few minutes and then bring it back up... but maybe that
functionality is different than what "bgscan" does.

Thanks,
Jake

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-03-15 at 11:35 -0500, Jake Magee wrote:
>> Is there a way to force wpa_supplicant to auto reconnect to networks
>> (and not TEMP_DISABLE them)?  I'm getting the following messages and
>> it appears that wpa_supplicant stops trying to connect to the
>> network.
>> I'm not sure if the ASSOC-REJECT is due to encountering a bad AP, or
>> just really poor signal strength.  But either way, I would really
>> prefer for it to continue to attempt connections so that when I come
>> back in range of a good AP that I automatically connect (this is a
>> headless embedded system).
>>
>> wpa_supplicant[497]: wlan0: Trying to associate with
>> e8:ed:f3:ba:b6:61
>> (SSID='EXAMPLE_AP' freq=2462 MHz)
>> wpa_supplicant[497]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT status_code=16
>> wpa_supplicant[497]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SSID-TEMP-DISABLED id=0
>> ssid="EXAMPLE_AP" auth_failures=1 duration=10 reason=CONN_FAILED
>>
>> I can connect to the serial console and execute `wpa_cli reconfigure`
>> to get the connection back up and running when back in range of a
>> good
>> AP.  It seems that the ASSOC-REJECT sets the network to TEMP-
>> DISABLED,
>> which prevents auto reconnecting?
>
> That message indicates that the SSID is only marked disabled for 10
> seconds.  The next time the supplicant scans, if that is more than 10
> seconds later, the network should be re-enabled and selected again.
>
> Is it perhaps that a scan is not happening soon enough?  Have you
> enabled background scanning?
>
> You should be able to force a scan with wpa_cli after 10s are up and
> see the network be re-enabled and then selected, I think.
>
> Dan