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]>
