From: Jouni Malinen (jkmaline_at_cc.hut.fi)
Date: 2002-08-31 08:37:34 UTC
On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 12:11:02PM +0200, Martin Whitlock wrote:
> Sometimes my AP keep sending me these messages. Apparently hostap decides
> that clients shouldn't associate. As soon as I turn off the radio at the
> client (00:05:4e:81:01:fd in the case below) hostap shuts up. I havn't found
> any pattern when this occurs, i.e. no high traffic load or anything else.
> Why does this happen? See 'dmesg' printout below. I use hostap 2002-05-19.
Actually, hostap accepted with authentication and tried to send a frame indicating this back to the station. However, this frame was not ACKed which causes the RetryErr TX exception. I do not know why this happens. It could be that the station does not receive the reply correctly or does not ACK it. In addition, the AP might somehow miss the ACK. It would be nice to get a full packet log from a third host in monitor mode. This might show whether the auth frame from AP was really sent and whether the station ACKed it.
I have seen similar cases and sometimes resetting either the station or AP wlan card (or both) has fixed the problem. However, I think there has been some cases in which this has not fixed authentication/association.
-- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA