CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED on high traffic with hostapd v0.4.9 and NetBSD 4.0

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 09:49:44PM +0200, Petar Bogdanovic wrote:

> I run a small AP for my flat with two ath-cards and two wireless
> networks, sn.a (11a) and sn.g (11g) and I use hostapd v0.4.9 because
> it's provided with NetBSD 4.0.
> 
> The networks work pretty well but when I try to raise the traffic (i.e.
> bulk scp), my Linux wpa_supplicant v0.5.10 drops the connection and has
> to reassociate/-authenticate.

wpa_supplicant and hostapd take care of authentication and encryption
keys configuration. However, they are not actively involved with
processing of the actual data frames. The debug logs from your setup
seem to indicate that the driver (madwifi/net80211) on the client side
is notifying wpa_supplicant of the disconnection. Similarly, hostapd
debug log is showing a notification from the driver (or NetBSD net80211
in this case, I would assume). I did not notice any problems from the
view point of wpa_supplicant/hostapd.

This type of issue is something that will most likely require debugging
the drivers (or kernel 802.11 implementation). You could either enable
debug on from the client driver or from the AP net80211 code and see
whether the reason for disconnection is reported there. I'm not very
familiar with debugging either madwifi or NetBSD net80211 and mailing
lists for either of those might be more suitable for getting help with
this type of an issue.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA