wpa-psk and hostap problem.

[Andrea G Forte]

Hi all.

I was conducting some experiments with a Netgear AP, and two linux 
laptops (kernel 2.4). On one of the laptops I used hostap 0.3.9 and 
wpa_supplicant 0.4.7 and on the other laptop I used hostap-driver0.3.9 
without any supplicant. On the AP I enabled WPA-PSK. Now, according to 
the standard, a client should first associate to the AP and then perform 
authentication. A long time ago I used hostAP as AP in a similar 
scenario and if I remember correctly it was following this behavior. 
However, the problem is that now the laptop on which I do *not* run the 
supplicant it even fails associating to the AP. I always get association 
failed (Linkstatus = 6). Is this a problem related to the Netgear AP 
that does not follow the standard or is it a problem with the hostap 
driver? The laptop with the wpa_supplicant associates correctly even if 
with a few problems (association fails many times before everything goes 
through).

Thank you for your help,
Andrea