hostap fills up logs with "Could not find STA ..." messages

[Max Grabert]

Hi,

I've reported this problem before (long long time ago, eg.
http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2004-March/006027.html and
http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2004-March/006027.html). but
the problem is still there and I don't have the time nor knowledge to
fix this myself.

A short description of the problem:

I'm running hostapd (and use the hostap kernel driver) with a Netgear MA-311
Prism PCI card (STA v1.8.0) on a Debian Linux (sarge, 2.6.12-rc6) system.
I always use the latest CVS and update the kernel and hostap(d) about
once every month.

The computer also does network bridging between eth0 and wlan0, and
everything works fine as expected ... except that my /var/log/syslog
fills up with
error messages like this:


01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993386)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 10:01:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993393)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993405)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 20:05:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993415)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993427)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA dc:a7:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993437)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993451)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993462)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA a2:c6:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993474)
01:49:49 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@101993479)
01:51:05 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:01:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102069588)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118130)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118241)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 88:88:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118251)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118264)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA dc:a7:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118275)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118286)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA a2:c6:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118301)
01:51:54 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:16:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102118310)
01:53:10 wifi0: Could not find STA 00:01:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102194630)
01:53:59 wifi0: Could not find STA be:ac:00:09:5b:40 for this TX error
(@102243140)
...


Several important notes:
=================
- this happening for over a year now, with basically any CVS versions
of hostap(d)
   released in that period. But I think about 2 years ago I didn't
have this problem.

- my system is a HP 9000/C3000, using a 64bit big-endian PA-RISC processor,
   but running in 32bit mode with 32bit kernel & userspace

- as you can see the messages usually come in bulks of 5-20, in an interval of
   about 2 minutes (again, usually)

- the output doesn't stop, regardless whether there is network traffic
or not, ie.
  even if there are no clients connected to HostAP.

- the last 4 bytes of the reported STA MAC is always 00:09:5b:40. Incidently the
   MAC of wlan0 and the bridging device br0 (eth0/wlan0) is
  in the form of 00:09:5b:40:xx:xx

- The first 2 bytes of the reported STA MAC seems always to be one of the 
  following, at last as much as I can see from my logs:
   00:16, 00:01, 00:16, 10:01, 20:05, a2:c6, be:ac, 88:88 and dc:a7.
  Note that none of these 2-byte formations are in any of the MACs I
use at home.


As I said, hostapd and bridging etc. works fine and is stable 24/365, but
it keeps filling up my logs. Can anybody give me a hint what is wrong and
how to fix it? I could comment out that print/syslog statement in the sources,
but I rather prefer that this is fixed properly ...


Thanks in advance,
   Max