Access point, some see it, some don't

[john dowd]

I have my access point setup using hostapd on a laptop using a wifi
USB dongle. The driver is the rt2x00usb driver. Hostapd comes up and
starts spewing out debug information and seems to be quite happy. I
then have a wifi enabled cell phone (It's a Neo Freerunner of all
things, really nifty) and I can run the "iwlist eth0 scan" command and
it can see the access point. In fact I have WPA2 enabled at both ends
and I can see from the hostapd debug that the access is even
negotiated successfully.

The next client is the Nokia E71 wifi enabled phone. It can see other
access points and I can connect to them but it can not see my access
point that is running on the laptop. I can see that when I first boot
the phone that it does the probes and that hostapd debug shows the MAC
address of the phone doing the following:

1229012536.048904: STA 00:18:f3:92:2c:92 sent probe request for broadcast SSID

My question is, what are the possible problems with a client not
seeing a particular access point? The client phone and the access
point are sitting side by side so I can't see it being a power level
problem. Is there some specific place in the hostapd code base I can
place some debug messages to see why the access point is not being
recognized?

One thing that may be a problem is I did have to modify the
rt2x00usb.c file according to the bug that was being talked about
yesterday. I went into the file and changed the code with the patched
line:

- __set_bit(TXDONE_UNKNOWN, &txdesc.flags);
+ __set_bit(TXDONE_SUCCESS, &txdesc.flags);

Without this, nothing works but perhaps its now interfering with the Nokia E71?

Any ideas would be very helpful.

Cheers!!
-- 
                              John Dowd
                              jdowd at slashdevslashnull.org
                              133 Waverley St.
                              Ottawa Ont. K2P 0V3
                              Home: (613)234-7884
                              Cell: (613)316-7884