Hostap 0.0.2 ?

[Mike Saywell]

I've also had some stability issues on several different platforms..

PC based with Sparklan PCI card (2 totally different machines).
Soekris based SBC with Zcomax PCMCIA.

I'm typically either using 1.3.6 or 1.5.6 secondary firmware.

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 06:16:49PM -0700, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 12:42:31PM +0200, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote:
> > The negative part is that I've been experiencing stability problems since
> > version 0.0.1
>
> I cannot easily duplicate this. I have been trying to kill the AP by
> TCP, UDP, and ping floods, but nothing seems to kill it. If it is indeed
> AP only issue, it could require more 802.11 management frames
> (authentication/association), etc.
>

If I pull a CD ISO through from wired to wireless or do ping floods *from*
the AP (at least with soekris hardware) that typically crashes it.

In both these cases the AP is doing most of the transmitting - could be
a clue, I dunno :)

> Could you use serial console to get kernel messages from the AP? It is
> quite difficult to figure this out without either being able to
> reproduce it myself or getting more information. What kind of usage
> patterns do you have with that AP? One station or more? Traffic from
> wired to wireless, wireless to wired, wireless to wireless (i.e.,
> between two STAs)? Do you use WEP?

The only thing I've ever spotted in terms of usage is continuous switching
between 5.5 and 11Mbit, i.e. in dmesg:

wlan0: STA 00:02:2d:53:62:e5 TX rate lowered to 55
wlan0: STA 00:02:2d:53:62:e5 TX rate raised to 110
wlan0: STA 00:02:2d:53:62:e5 TX rate lowered to 55
wlan0: STA 00:02:2d:53:62:e5 TX rate raised to 110

AFAIK the tx rate on the host isnt actually changing...

When the freeze happens it's always locked the machine solid.
So debugging is kinda hard, if you have any suggestions I'm happy to
play guinea pig :)

I'm not totally sure if it's HostAP or the firmware causing problems, I'll
try and do a comprehensive test this weekend to see which combinations
of driver and firmware are or are not stable.

Mike