Wi-Fi not connecting (well, getting instantly deauthed due to AP-STA-POSSIBLE-PSK-MISMATCH after connecting) is apparently a relatively common problem with IoT devices. And most people seem to point to ESP8266-based ones.

Well, I’ve never had a problem with ESP, but today I’ve been setting up an RTL8711AF based device (Xiaomi qmi.powerstrip.v1) and it was failing just like that.

Turns out this device just completely fails when 802.11w Management Frame Protection is on (even optionally). Ugh. Thanks Realtek.

Finally got around to actually trying out ZeroTier. It’s pretty awesome!

Okay, it has a couple downsides:

• it’s not automatically a mesh network, you have to designate a node as a “moon” to make it pass traffic between other nodes (that couldn’t punch holes through NAT)
• the Android client is not open source and doesn’t have UI to tell it to orbit a moon

But other than that… the simplicity is lovely. No screwing around with config files, restarts and whatnot. Just a very small & easy set of admin commands. And automatic IP address assignment (especially 6PLANE) is amazing.