Another OpenBSD Wifi Thread

[commodorejohn]

I recently pulled out my old OpenBSD laptop and did a wipe and fresh install of 6.2 on it - but stupidly, I didn't save the wireless configuration that took me so much effort to get working before. So I'm back to having wireless not working no matter what I do, and while I can find thread with similar symptoms, none of them seem to have a clear solution.

So here's how things stand: the post-install process installed the firmware for the wifi, which is a built-in Atheros device that shows up as ath0. /etc/hostname.ath0 contains the following:

-chan -bssid -wpakey
nwid "arbol" media mode 11g
wpakey "(censored)"
dhcp

ifconfig using these options will run without complaint and reflect these values in its report:

ath0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
         lladdr 00:11:85:1a:9f:27
         index 1 priority 4 llprio 3
         groups: wlan
         media: IEEE802.11 autoselect (DS1)
         status: no network
         ieee80211: nwid arbol chan 7 bssid 90:c7:92:57:bb:c0 wpakey (censored) wpaprotos wpa2 wpaakms psk wpaciphers ccmp wpagroupcipher ccmp

The "media" value changes periodically to "DS1 mode 11b" or "OFDM6" like it's activelly trying to connect, but "status" never changes to anything besides "no network." Running dhclient on it gives the "no link ........... sleeping" message that so many other threads have mentioned. dmesg has nothing in particular to say about it after the ath0 device is recognized during boot.

Can someone help me figure out what's going on here? By everything I read in the man pages, it sounds like I should have everything correctly configured, but it just refuses to work...