HostAP accesspoint freezes system

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 10:59:09AM -0400, Andrew Barr wrote:

> 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.

Huh.. That 30-45 second wait requirement sounds quite odd. Could that
just be triggered by a client that stops associating after the AP has
been down for a while?

Unfortunately, this kind of problem is a bit difficult to debug unless
you can get some output from the crashes system. Would it be possible to
try to do this with serial console and log that to another host? Not
that there are any guarantees of this being able to provide debug
output in this kind of case.

> 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).

Have you tried plaintext configuration, i.e., can you see any difference
on the crashes based on the AP configuration?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA