WDS problems

[Josh Green]

Hello,

I have a Linux access point using hostap and a Senao PCMCIA 200mw Prism
2.5 based wireless card.  I was using a Senao NL-3054CB3 802.11g
wireless bridge as a repeater to the Linux access point, but was having
all sorts of problems with it.  It would often lose connection to the
access point and would have to be rebooted, or sometimes even
re-configured.

So I setup a second Linux based device as a repeater instead.  It seems
to work better, but it still periodically loses its connection to the
access point.  If I do a flood ping from a client machine to the access
point it will fail for hundreds of packets, until eventually it will
become accessible again and browsing/etc will work.

Is anyone successfully using WDS with hostap or can confirm this strange
behavior?  I suspect that perhaps the wireless WDS connection is not
that great, but I'm not sure how to get the signal level of a wds link
(any way to do this?)

Here is the relevant bits from my config:

Linux access point:
iwpriv wlan0 wds_add 00:02:6F:36:55:A2
brctl addbr br0
ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig wlan0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig wlan0wds0 0.0.0.0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 wlan0
brctl addif br0 wlan0wds0
ifconfig br0 10.2.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.2.1.255


Linux repeater:
iwpriv wlan0 wds_add 00:02:6F:36:55:B5
brctl addbr br0
ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig wlan0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig wlan0wds0 0.0.0.0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 wlan0
brctl addif br0 wlan0wds0
ifconfig br0 10.2.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.2.1.255


I'm running hostapd on the Linux access point, but not on the repeater
(should I be?)  I've noticed that I am unable to ping the access point
from an SSH shell on the repeater, but I can access it from the client
machine.

Thanks in advance for any help in regards to these problems.  Cheers.
	Josh Green

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