hostapd: did not acknowledge authentication/association response

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 07:10:20PM +1000, Tim Connolly wrote:
> Kernel: latest rt2x00.git

> When attempting to use WPA or WPA2 with nl80211 I get a continuous loop of 
> the following output from hostapd as the client attempts to connect. Is 
> this some way I might be able to resolve this problem?

> MGMT (TX callback) fail
> mgmt::auth cb
> wlan0: STA 00:12:f0:76:03:b9 IEEE 802.11: did not acknowledge > authentication response

I have not tested mac80211 with rt2x00 and do not know what to expect as
far as current AP mode functionality is concerned. hostapd depends on
getting a TX status notification from mac80211 for association to be
completed (that is a requirement of 802.11 standard) and in this
particular case, it looks like that the TX status for transmitted
management frames is coming back as failure.

The failure report could be caused by either the client really not
acknowledging the frames or, more likely, by the rt2x00 driver not
delivering the status correctly for management frames for some reason.
If you happen to have access to a wireless sniffer that you could use to
capture the authentication and associate frame handshakes between the
devices, it would be interesting to verify that the frames are indeed
acknowledged properly. If that is the case, someone more familiar than I
with the rt2x00 driver would need to take a closer look at what exactly
is happening with TX status reporting for frames sent over the
management interface.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA