[Voyage-linux] Voyage ONE / DNMA92 dropping offline at random intervals

[Norman Henderson]

Hi, my problem looks similar to the following but it isn't clear if
there is/was a solution:

http://list.voyage.hk/pipermail/voyage-linux/2009-September/012094.html

I'm using Voyage ONE - version 0.7 build date 20100603 on an Alix 3d3,
as a combined FW (Shorewall), 802.11bgn AP (hostapd 0.6.9 with nl80211
- libnl 1.1, configured for wpa + wpa2 with psk), and file server
(Samba). External connectivity is via an external 3G USB dongle.
Eventually I hope to get the Asterisk stuff set up as well as printer
sharing.

Everything including the wifi works fine for an undetermined time,
minutes or more likely a few hours. Then the radio appears to stop
transmitting (disappears from the list of available networks on my
Win7, WinXP and cellphone).

Wlan0 is bridged to eth0 - since this IS my Net access, I've had to
fall back to wired connectivity. I think the behavior was the same
before they were bridged but I'm not certain. I get lots of messages
in daemon.log that look like normal key exchanges etc. (to me - not
experienced in this area), and then an unexplained "deauthenticated"
message. If I stop and restart hostapd it all starts working again.

Jul  5 16:48:38 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: authenticated
Jul  5 16:48:38 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: associated (aid 1)
Jul  5 16:48:38 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 RADIUS:
starting accounting session 4C31F3A6-0000003C
Jul  5 16:48:38 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 WPA:
pairwise key handshake completed (RSN)
Jul  5 16:48:40 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:13:02:be:7b:f9 IEEE
802.11: authenticated
Jul  5 16:48:40 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:13:02:be:7b:f9 IEEE
802.11: associated (aid 2)
Jul  5 16:48:40 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:13:02:be:7b:f9 RADIUS:
starting accounting session 4C31F3A6-0000003D
Jul  5 16:48:40 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:13:02:be:7b:f9 WPA:
pairwise key handshake completed (RSN)
Jul  5 16:48:42 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: authenticated
Jul  5 16:48:42 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: associated (aid 1)
... lots of repetitions of the above ...
Jul  5 16:48:44 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: authenticated
Jul  5 16:48:44 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: associated (aid 1)
Jul  5 16:48:45 voyage hostapd: wlan0: STA 00:1e:65:09:f8:66 IEEE
802.11: deauthenticated due to local deauth request

There is no message saying the second station is also deauthenticated,
but at this point the DNMA92 becomes invisible to the outside world,
both Win stations are dropped and neither they nor the cellphone can
see the "voyage" SSID any more.

There are some rather unclear hints in the wireless.kernel.org lists
that suggest this MIGHT be a known issue and MIGHT be resolved with
their  "bleeding edge" code - that doesn't excite me at all. Plus I
would need to be using kernel 2.6.34, voyage ONE is using 2.6.30, and
I don't know what the implications would be of upgrading just the
kernel (e.g. from Debian's "experimental" repository).

One more thing isn't clear - is there any utility or log that can tell
me what the wireless network stack thinks it's doing or why it thinks
there was a "local request" to deauthenticate?

I can post config files, iw outputs, dmesg, etc. etc. if needed. Any
help appreciated!

Thanks, Norm