wpa_supplicant stops carrying traffic after some hours

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2018 at 08:13:54AM -0700, James Feeney wrote:
> After a few hours, the wireless traffic continues to work on the local network, but just stops working across the outside network.  Now, this sounds like some problem with the Access Point or with the router - which is a linux desktop machine - but restarting wpa_supplicant on the remote machine fixes the problem.  The IP addresses and the routing table seem normal, but outside traffic seems to be dropped at the interface.  There is no firewall running, so that should not be an issue.
> 
> I suspect that wpa_supplicant is the problem, because a wpa_supplicant restart fixes things, but I don't know how else to troubleshoot this.  Any suggestions?

Restarting wpa_supplicant may clear whatever was broken here because
that forces the station to reassociate with the AP and practically clear
all state, but if I understood your description correctly, this is very
unlikely to be an issue caused by wpa_supplicant. If the traffic goes
through fine to the AP and to the local network, but fails to go through
to "outside network" (which I'm assuming is referring to going through
an IP router), the Wi-Fi connection part is likely to be functional and
issue is somewhere in the AP. Debugging this on the AP would likely be
more fruitful path at finding the issue or alternatively, looking at a
wireless sniffer capture to see if the relevant frames make out from the
station to the AP.

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Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA