Fix flaky hotspot->home WiFi reconnect in netwatch

Real-hardware finding: netwatch repeatedly reported 'home WiFi not found'
4 times over 13min while sitting right next to the router. Root cause:
a plain 'nmcli con up home-wifi' straight out of AP mode relies on NM's
scan cache for wlan0, which is stale/empty coming out of AP mode (the
radio can't scan while acting as an AP). A single con-up attempt didn't
wait for a fresh scan to land before giving up.

Fix: explicitly drop the AP connection first to free the radio, force a
fresh scan with a settle delay, and retry the connect attempt (longer
30s timeout) up to 2 times before conceding and restoring the hotspot.
Bumped the systemd unit's TimeoutStartSec to 180s to give the retry loop
enough headroom (was defaulting to 90s).

Co-authored-by: Copilot <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
Mathieu Moran
2026-08-09 15:44:19 -04:00
co-authored by Copilot
parent fc18f71cfe
commit 04cf74ccd3
2 changed files with 28 additions and 2 deletions
+3
View File
@@ -5,4 +5,7 @@ Wants=NetworkManager.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
# Retry loop (down AP, rescan, retry connect up to 2x) can take ~80s worst
# case - default 90s systemd start timeout was too tight a margin.
TimeoutStartSec=180
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/yaris-netwatch.sh
+25 -2
View File
@@ -39,9 +39,32 @@ fi
logger -t "$LOG_TAG" "wlan0 is on hotspot, checking for home WiFi ($HOME_CON)..."
if nmcli --wait 20 con up "$HOME_CON" >"$LAST_LOG" 2>&1; then
# Real-hardware finding: a plain "nmcli con up home-wifi" straight out of AP
# mode reliably reports "not found" even when actually in range, repeatedly
# (confirmed: 4 failures in a row over 13min while sitting right next to the
# router). NM's scan cache for wlan0 is stale/empty coming out of AP mode
# (the radio literally can't scan while acting as an AP - see comment above),
# and a single con-up attempt doesn't wait for a fresh scan to land before
# giving up. Fix: explicitly drop the AP connection first to free the radio,
# force a fresh scan and give it a few seconds to populate, then retry the
# connect attempt with a longer timeout up to 2 times before conceding and
# restoring the hotspot.
nmcli con down "$AP_CON" >"$LAST_LOG" 2>&1
connected=false
for attempt in 1 2; do
nmcli device wifi rescan ifname "$IFACE" >>"$LAST_LOG" 2>&1
sleep 5
if nmcli --wait 30 con up "$HOME_CON" >>"$LAST_LOG" 2>&1; then
connected=true
break
fi
logger -t "$LOG_TAG" "home WiFi attempt $attempt failed, retrying..."
done
if [ "$connected" = true ]; then
logger -t "$LOG_TAG" "home WiFi found, switched to '$HOME_CON'"
else
logger -t "$LOG_TAG" "home WiFi not found, restoring hotspot"
logger -t "$LOG_TAG" "home WiFi not found after retries, restoring hotspot"
nmcli con up "$AP_CON" >>"$LAST_LOG" 2>&1
fi