Re: wifi hotspot workaround

Ok, I'm honing in on the details. There were different
things going on that were making it confusing. It still
might be different things going on, but there's a little
more info.

For now, it seems that I get the "athn0: device timeout"
that the man page for athn0 mentions. That resets athn0,
it 'creates ibss' but then it proceeds to start hostap mode
from the hostname.athn0 config file, at least this one time that
this just happened. The wifi client device proceeded to
connect to the wifi network just fine.

Before, the problem was that my phone wouldn't connect
to the wifi after this athn0 cop out. It wouldn't even see
the network in scan results. Now it did see it and
reconnected. This may still occur later, but at least it rules out
that some athn0 restarts aren't the issue.

However, I changed my hostname.athn0 config to a specific
channel today so that it doesn't change channels on these
device timeouts. When I was checking logs I saw that after
some of the timeouts the channel changed, and then my
Android phone would not see the saved network after an
athn0 cop out because Android, I think, saves the specific
channel along with the network info. Maybe that was the
issue, we'll see.

I do not understand what causes athn0: device timeout
resets on the wifi card. There's no info on the athn0 man
page except a one-liner. There's virtually no network activity
on the athn0 or the egress interface when this device reset
occurs. There's however constant background scanning of
wifi networks that shows up in the log, which is normal
from what I gather, but I get constant, constant network
node cache purges for some reason...like, twice per minute
with up to 8 stations per node cache purge, which does
not seem that excessive.

On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 5:44 PM ofthecentury <ofthecentury@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 5:29 PM Peter N. M. Hansteen <peter@bsdly.net> wrote:
> >
> > why?
>
> I got "disassoc"s events in the log.
>
> > The option to make the driver output more information is
> >
> > debug
>
> I did this. "ifconfig athn0 debug." That's how I saw "disassoc"
> events.
>
> Anyone can send disassociation events to the access point?
> Or just the authenticated users? I think I read dissasociation
> events are unencrypted? I have set "stayauth" option in the
> ifconfig for the athn0, but that doesn't really do anything if
> someone sends disassociation packets to the AP?