hello.
Rest and fresh review reveals the culprit. The network for VAP is not defined. I tried to use bridge to bridge between vap0 and wlan0 explicitly. Under 16.04 and 18.04, no bridge was required. A bridge requires iptables. Here is my ifconfig output. The virtual network, vap0 , does not have a network defined. Hence, when I connect, I get the universal subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 as generated by "no, you didn't get an IP from your provider. The virtual IP wlan0 is dependent on receiving help from something. Time to build a bridge.
vap0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 169.254.149.232 netmask 255.255.0.0 broadcast 169.254.255.255
inet6 fe80::7227:4587:bb11:12c3 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether b8:27:eb:62:37:f8 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 2249 bytes 682949 (682.9 KB)
RX errors 0 dropped 4 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 681 bytes 226004 (226.0 KB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
wlan0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether b8:27:eb:62:37:f8 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0