wpa_supplicant keeps de- and reassociating

[Wes Morgan]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Tobias Roth wrote:

> Hi
>
> I see the following when I connect to the universitys wlan with
> 7.0-PRERELEASE and if_ath0:
>
> I associate to a wlan using wpa_supplicant. There are several base
> stations for the same network around. First-time association works a bit
> slow but otherwise well, but then, after a while (quite frequently),
> something initiates a rescan, and the connections drops for some time.
> The laptops position was not changed during that time.
>
> Then, most of the time, things fix themselves and the interface
> reassociates, but this can take sme time. If I issue "ifconfig ath0" a
> few times during one of those dropouts, I can see different channels
> being tried, and also sometimes my ssid is shown, sometimes no ssid is
> shown during scanning.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1) what is causing these deassociate/scan/reassociate cycles?
> 2) why is it unsetting the ssid, when I explicitly set it in wpa_conf?
> 2) how can I stop this (i.e. keep the current connection after initial
> association?

Are you using WPA or WPA2? I was seeing this behavior sometimes, and 
switching to WPA seemed to eliminate it.