Instability with ipw2200, wpa_supplicant and hostapd

[Gustavo Michels]

Hi all,

I set up an access point at my office with hostapd on a computer with a D-Link 
DWL-G520 (Atheros) card. Here are the versions I used (Gentoo ebuilds):

- hostapd 0.5.2
- madwifi-ng-0.1502.20060414

My test client, a linux computer with a Intel PRO 2915ABG adapter is 
experiencing some connection instability. It will connect fine, but after a 
random amount of time, wpa_supplicant will reconnect by itself. I am using 
WPA2 with TKIP (btw I can't associate to the AP using CCMP, but that's 
another problem).

The problem seems to be really random, as I was unable to find a way to 
trigger it. Sometimes it happens every couple minutes, sometimes it will stay 
stable for 30 minutes or more.

Here's what I am using in the client (Gentoo, also):

- ipw2200-1.1.2
- ipw2200-firmware-3.0
- wpa_supplicant-0.5.2

At home I have a D-Link DI-624 router (also WPA2-TKIP), where the connection 
doesn't seem to suffer from this issue, at least not so frequently, if it 
ever happens.

Here are links to the config files for hostapd and wpa_supplicant. I have also 
uploaded some log files from both. I started hostapd on the server, then 
started wpa_supplicant on the client, which connected fine. After about 10 
minutes the reconnect issue happened and that's where the log ends, right 
after the client reconnect.

http://colortech.serveftp.net/~gmichels/hostapd.conf
http://colortech.serveftp.net/~gmichels/wpa_supplicant.conf
http://colortech.serveftp.net/~gmichels/hostapd.log
http://colortech.serveftp.net/~gmichels/wpa_supplicant.log

As a side note, I left wpa_supplicant running while I was typing this email, 
which took about 20 minutes, and it reconnected about 10 times in this period 
of time.

I have looked thru the archives and searched the web, but I couldn't find 
anything specific to my issue. I am sorry if this has been addressed before. 
I don't know if the issue is on the AP or client or even both, so if anyone 
have any ideas, I would be glad to hear.

Thanks for your help,
Gustavo