How to prevent idle WDS stations from being dropped?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Following up on this discussion: Ath10k: the dreadful bug "deauthenticated due to inactivity (timer DEAUTH/REMOVE)" - #11 by huj3r

I've got OpenWrt 22.05.03 running on two Linksys WRT1900ACS routers. I've got "Disable Inactivity Polling" and "Disassociate on Low Acknowledgement" unchecked, so polling should be taking place but in spite of that the WDS Client keeps on dropping the connection to the WDS AP due to:

[ 2807.808995] phy0-sta0: disassociated from 60:38:e0:db:af:83 (Reason: 4=DISASSOC_DUE_TO_INACTIVITY)

I know that the idle timeout polling is at fault because if I decrease the value of "Station inactivity limit" to 1 minute, I start getting disconnects at this frequency.

I understand that I can work around this problem by increasing the timeout to a large value, but I'd like to know why the polling isn't reseting the timer.

How can I debug this further? Is this a known issue for WDS configurations?

Thank you.

2

You are not really a mesh network; try this.

3

I don't understand. Why do you think my configuration is not really a mesh network? I am trying to extend the range of a single SSID using a second router as a repeater. Clients from one router must be able to see each other.

In any case, I found instructions for increasing hostapd's logging level at https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/debugging#logging_hostapd_behaviour but didn't find anything new/meaningful to fix this problem.

4

It is just, I've found, WDS to be problematic.

5

Have not experienced your errors on my WDS setup. Has been very stable for years. I make sure settings are kept at default and use WPA2/AES for encryption. Maybe try resetting your APs and start over again and just leave everything at default. Set country code and choose a clear frequency for the WDS connection.