hostap crashing - solved, I think

[mike-hostap at tiedyenetworks.com]

Howdy -

	So every night usually starting @ 6am and going till 8am (and on
weekends from 10pm onwards...), my dual pcmcia card access point, has
crashed, for no discernable reason. I've posted tcpdump of the frames in
the air (captured from 15' away from the antenna so I think it's good) and
didn't get any response. I also went thru the extremem hassle of cabling
up the serial port on the AP to observe kernel panic messages (if any),
and there were none. It would just go down and that was that.

	Last night I changed the config. I disabled wlan1 (txpower off, 
interface down) so that the AP was only running with 1 card (wlan0), and 
I configured a second AP to take over for the disabled card in the 
first. My thoughts were, ok, if it's getting exposed to some killer frame that takes 
hostap down, then this new one should also go down. And the timing was 
good - last night it was happening every few minutes, and sometimes it 
wouldn't get but just a few seconds of runtime before it went down again. 
So when this change got implemented, I noticed that the crashing stopped 
immediately. 

	Since splitting this into two seperate AP's seems to have 
solved the problem (it's been 12 hours now and based on history I would 
have expected many more crashes), I think now the possibillities have to 
be one or more of:

	1) A hostap bug of some sort in dual-card configurations 
	2) A linux kernel bridge bug of some kind
	3) A bad card on wlan1
	4) A bad pcmcia port on wlan1
	

	I do have hostap in dual card configurations without trouble 
elsewhere, but these also aren't bridging their ports together either (and 
are running earlier revs of hostap).

	Anyone care to comment?

 


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