WLAN stops working when idle

[Paul B Mahol]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Leonardo M. Ramé <martinrame at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have noted that my wlan stops responding when the O.S. does not use the network for a while (10 minutes aprox), and I have to do "ifconfig wlan0 down && ifconfig wlan0 up && dhclient wlan0" to reconnect.
>
> The network card is the internal Wi-Fi from my Dell Inspiron 1525, and uses ndis to wrap the WinXp driver.
>
> /etc/rc.conf:
> ...
> wlans_ndis0="wlan0"
> ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"
> wpa_supplicant_enable="YES"
> ...
>
> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
>
> ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
> ctrl_interface_group=wheel
> ap_scan=1
> network={
>        ssid="strada"
>        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
>        psk="martin13"
> }
>
> uname -a:
>
> FreeBSD inspiron-1521 8.1-RC2 FreeBSD 8.1-RC2 #0: Tue Jun 29 20:42:40 UTC 2010     root at almeida.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>
>
> Any hint?

You got any output from wpa_supplicant and console?

You could check this NDISulator code:
http;//gitorious.org/NDISulator

I did some work on new state switching on net80211 layer, so if
connection get lost for any reason it will try to reassociate (code on
HEAD fails badly in this scenario almost always).
I also did support for wep and wpa(2) via bsd driver (you can still
use ndis driver - I'm talking about wpa_supplicant _drivers_) but I
did not tested it much.
You should also run ndis_events(8) so that events from ndis driver are
passed to wpa_supplicant(8).
What version of driver are you using? Newest ones (<=5.1 API) I tested
exibit at least one bug in NDISuator which I did not resolved yet.