2018-07-12

Wi-Fi on OpenBSD just got a lot easier

... if you're running the latest OpenBSD-CURRENT snapshot, at any rate...

Last night, Reyk Floeter posted this teaser, hinting that phessler@'s work on this feature was inching toward completion.

And it's already in snapshots dated July 12, 2018 and newer. Some mirrors haven't gotten this snapshot yet, as of the time of publication. What this means is that you can load up all of your frequently-used wireless networks into your wifi adapter's /etc/hostname.if file, and it will attempt to auto-join them in the order they're listed. It'll be interesting to see if the installer for OpenBSD 6.4 uses this syntax if you set up a wireless network during the install process.

I like the simplicity of this, versus the complexity of configuring wpa_supplicant, NetworkManager, NetCtl and similar tools. I suspect if you've got only wpa-enabled networks in the list, it should be resistant to most evil twin attacks such as Karma, but I haven't tried that yet.

Documentation of this feature doesn't seem to be covered in the hostname.if or individual wireless driver man pages yet, but the above photo was obvious enough for me to create a working example configuration file for my daily-driver laptop running -CURRENT (on which I'm writing this article).

It looks like a lot of other good things are coming out of the g2k18 hackaton, including advances on unveil, a simple way to control filesystem-level access on a per-process basis, which Bob Beck presented at BSDCan 2018.