A text-based 802.11 wireless network manager for OpenBSD

As of OpenBSD 6.4, this application is obsolete. A new feature allows wifi to join any of multiple wireless networks defined in /etc/hostname.if(5).

Thus, I am archiving this project. It will continue to exist in read-only mode for the forseeable time being, just in case.

If you run wiconn without any arguments, it will scan for wireless networks and display them in a list. The network you're connected to will show up with a green background. Open networks are shown with a red background.

If you have a saved network in ~/.wiconn, you can simply run wiconn.sh with the network name as the first argument.

Wiconn can save a network you've connected to, and can save the BSSID to protect you from most evil twin attacks.

The ~/.wiconn file can be used to set the default wireless interface, and also stores wireless network names, WPA keys and (optionally) BSSIDs. It should be readable and writable only by your user (chmod 0600).

Written in Bourne shell and relying only on tools available in the OpenBSD base distribution, wiconn strives for ease of use without external dependencies while remaining aesthetically-pleasing in any terminal or console supporting colors.

Wiconn can automatically detect wireless interfaces. If you have only one such interface, it will use that one by default. If you have multiple wireless interfaces, you can specify which one you wish to use by default in the script itself, or in the configuration file. Otherwise, it will prompt you.

Wiconn can remember your wireless networks and their WPA/WPA2 PSK keys. Note that for the time being, these keys are stored in the clear in ~/.wiconn which is created with mode 0600 (only your user can read and write to the file). I suppose if this is good enough for your hostname.if(5) file and your private SSH keys, it should be good enough for this.

Wiconn has to do a few things as root, and assumes you are in the wheel group and have doas(1) configured with nopass rules for dhclient, ifconfig and pkill. To keep doas from incessantly prompting or failing with errors, at a bare minimum, the below lines should be added to the end of /etc/doas.conf:

permit nopass :wheel as root cmd /usr/bin/pkill args dhclient
permit nopass :wheel as root cmd /sbin/ifconfig
permit nopass :wheel as root cmd /sbin/dhclient

ANSI color escape sequences are hard-coded, which might mess with certain terminals. It seems to work great in most X11 terminals and on the wscons(4) console in text mode.

Enjoy!