RCA-2026-03-13-001: Prevention

Preventive Measures

Short-term (This week)

Action Owner Status

Create WPA2-PSK fallback connection (mobile hotspot)

Evan

[ ] Pending

Increase DHCP timeout on WiFi connection

Evan

[ ] Pending

Document WiFi troubleshooting in nmcli.adoc

Evan

[ ] Pending

Long-term (This quarter)

Action Owner Status

Add DHCP monitoring to pfSense

Evan

[ ] Pending

Document WiFi VLAN architecture

Evan

[ ] Pending

Detection

How was it detected?

  • Manual observation - connection failed on nmcli c up

Detection Gap

Could add monitoring for:

  • DHCP lease assignment success rate

  • WiFi client association/disassociation events

  • 802.1X authentication success vs IP assignment success

Lessons Learned

What went well

  • EAP-TLS debugging skills - quickly identified auth was NOT the issue

  • Wired fallback available - work not blocked

  • Log analysis identified DHCP timeout as root cause

What could be improved

  • Need WPA2-PSK fallback for infrastructure failures

  • DHCP timeout default too short

  • No documented troubleshooting runbook for WiFi issues

Key Takeaways

  1. EAP-TLS success != connectivity - DHCP is a separate failure domain

  2. Always have a fallback - mobile hotspot connection pre-configured

  3. reason=250 = DHCP timeout, not authentication failure