Anyone else having roaming problems with hostap?

Joe Parks jphstap at roinet.com
Tue Oct 21 14:08:38 EDT 2003


We're seeing a strange problem with win2k laptops and hostap access
points.

When a laptop wanders out of an area covered by one hostap box and into
one covered by another (with same essid) it will re-associate to the new
hostap box (iwevents shows a register event for the laptop, and the
laptop wireless utility claims to now be associated to the new hostap
box) but no data will flow between them.  A wireless sniffer shows that
the laptop is making no attempt to send wireless frames to the hostap
box.

The problem can be cleared up simply by pushing the "rescan" button in
the laptop's wireless utility.   So it sounds like the problem lives on
the windows driver side of things, but we've observed this same problem
with a number of different wireless cards (prism2 based cards seem to
have it the most, but maybe it just seems that we because we have more
of them than anything else) and we've tried updating to the latest
drivers for all our affected devices with no luck.

A similar, possibly the same, problem occurs with some embedded devices
we use, like Panasonic wireless cameras.  (but they don't have a handy
"rescan" button to push, so they have to be rebooted when they roam)

So is a fair chunk of the wireless world just poorly implementing
roaming support on the client side or could it be that something they're
expecting isn't being done by the hostap driver?

Firmware info for hostap box:

wlan0: NIC: id=0x800c v1.0.0
wlan0: PRI: id=0x15 v1.0.7
wlan0: STA: id=0x1f v1.3.6

Hostap driver tested from 0.0.3 to 0.1.1





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