hostapd can´t access device ?!

[Tim Boneko]

First of all, i guess i should introduce myself a bit, right? I?m Tim 
Boneko, 30 year old amateur maintaining two little networks in southern 
germany. One of them is my private network with an AP based on a prism54 
wlan card. Works with WEP encryption, but i want to get rid of this.

First i installed hostapd from the current sarge distro which ended with 
the same error as my self-built hostapd: After executing

hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

it says

> ioctl(SIOCGIFINDEX): No such device

The strace output of this says in the appropriate line:

ioctl(4, SIOCGIFINDEX, {???, "eth1ap"}) = -1 ENODEV (No such device)

eth1 is actually the device i configured to use. Before building 
hostapd, i edited defconfig and copied it to .config; most of all i 
removed the comment before the prism54 option. Buidling and installing 
worked well so far.
Any hints?

	timbo