HostAP accesspoint freezes system

[Andrew Barr]

I recently gave up battling the madwifi driver in Master mode and
returned to using an D-Link DWL-520E as an AP with the HostAP drivers.
When I used HostAP like this before it was rock-solid stable unlike
madwifi. Now, as if to taunt me, after a few hours of wireless usage the
AP box freezes. Hard. On the kernel command line is "panic=10" so it
reboots 10 seconds after a kernel panic. It freezes so hard it doesn't
even do that. If I immediately reboot the system freezes in the same
manner when loading the hostap_pci module. I have to leave it off for
30-45 seconds or it will either freeze there or when it attempts to load
the primary firmware. I was using hostap-driver 0.4.1 (the latest from
the Debian archive) and firmware 1.1.2/1.8.4 but I just now upgraded the
drivers to 0.4.4 and the station firmware was downgraded to 1.8.3 (what
I used before). The kernel is a custom-rolled 2.6.13 built with GCC
4.0.1 (as are the hostAP modules--I don't think it's a compiler/kernel
version issue). It does not freeze if there are no wireless clients--I
switched out the cards yesterday and it froze every few hours like this
on me, but it stayed up and running all night last night while no one
was online.

The wireless card (DWL-520E) is bridged with a RTL8139 card to provide
seamless wired<->wireless access. There is also a RTL8139 card connected
to my cable modem, and iptables does a NAT firewall. hostapd is
configured with WPA-EAP (TKIP) and PEAP-MSCHAPv2 (internal
authenticator).

The computer system is based on a VIA chipset:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 0259
0000:00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 1259
0000:00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 2259
0000:00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3259
0000:00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 4259
0000:00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 7259
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
0000:00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:00:0a.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Prism 2.5 Wavelan
chipset (rev 01)
0000:00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc.
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
0000:00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB
1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB
1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB
1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB
1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
0000:00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge
[K8T800 South]0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies,
Inc.: Unknown device 3118 (rev 02)

It has a Intel Celeron processor in it, 2.00GHz.

Thanks in advance for any tips/tricks/suggestions.

--
Andrew Barr | http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/

Windows is a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit shell for an 8-bit OS
written for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't
stand 1 bit of competition!