Number of workstation

[Christian Lamparter]

On Wednesday, July 06, 2011 08:38:50 AM Mike Baroukh wrote:
> I'm a new hostap user so sorry if this is a dumb question.
> I made an access point that works nice but seems to have a limit on 
> number of workstations that can connect to it.
> When too much users are connected, the next who will try will trigger in 
> syslog :
> 
> If another workstation disconnect, this one will then success.
> My hope is to handle about 50 workstations but I actually, the max I can 
> handle is 7 simultaneous users (saw using kill -USR1 <pid>) .
> 
> My question is : could this be a built in limit of the usb dongle I use?
> Parameter max_num_sta is set to 500 so the limit is not on hostapd.
> In fact, i'm not really sure to understand the limit between what 
> hostapd does, the wifi driver does and the wifi card does ...
> 
> Infos on my config :
> My box is built on a small pc so I had to use a usb wifi dongle : 
> TP-LINK  TL-WN721N
> (lsusb : Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0cf3:9271 Atheros Communications, Inc. 
> AR9271 802.11n)
> I used linux-wireless to build the ath9k_htc driver.
> The OS is a debian squeeze 32 bits.

a quote from "ath9k_htc: Allow upto two simultaneous interfaces":
 The maximum number of stations that can be handled in
 the firmware is 8, manage the station slots accordingly.

I guess one slot is reserved for a different use [probably for
the AP interface itself...] 

Regards,
	Chr