On Thu, 16 Jun 2011, John Smith <jvin248 at gmail dot com> wrote:
> Jun 16 01:10:00     hostapd: ral0: STA 00:1c:bf:1d:xx:xx IEEE  
> 802.11: deassociated

ral0... I guess that's a Ralink card. Another guess, but is it a USB  
one? I have a Linux netbook with a built-in USB ralink card. For it to  
work properly with hostapd, I have to wait for the rt2x00 driver  
developers to implement USB acks. Which, fun fun, apparently requires  
changes to the USB stack on Linux.

( http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/AP-mode_Howto -
"Note that this will not work with Ralink's USB chips because we don't  
know how to get status messages (ACK/FAIL) for sent packets."
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Todo -
Implement ACK handling for rt2500usb/rt73usb/rt2800usb )

The reason your message seems the same to me even though m0n0 is  
BSD-based is because I get the exact same messages from hostapd when  
it has trouble, and only with WPA/WPA2. I haven't looked into the  
status of Ralink drivers on BSD but I bet you'll find it's the same  
problem.

For me it fixed the problem to lower the encryption to WEP, which is  
of course woefully insecure. I threw a MAC address filter on for some  
more somewhat ineffective security. (another effect of the  
work-in-progress Linux drivers is no antenna control, so it doesn't  
work outside my house anyway ;-)

> Then I found if I reboot the router (lately all I do is turn off  
> then back on WPA on the wireless interface page) it resets the  
> router and the client can immediately attach.

I suggest you somehow script m0n0 to do this for you, automatically ;-)

Hope this helps.

Adam Swift