Question: Why can't a station using an Intel 3945 wireless card associate to the AP?
Product and Software: This article applies to all Aruba controllers and ArubaOS 3.1.
When the Access Point (AP) is connected to the controller over the WAN link with round-trip delay of 40 ms or more, a station using Intel 3945 ABG wireless card and without using the external power adapter will not be able to associate to the AP.
This issue is caused by the Intel driver. Aruba has reported the issue to Intel.
The workaround is to change the power management from the default setting to highest.
The solution is to upgrade to ArubaOS 3.3.1. In the 3.3.1 release, the 802.11 auth frame is processed by the AP, which eliminates the delay over the WAN links.
Example: The following trace is captured on a station attempting to associate to an open system SSID. The Aruba OS version is 3.1.1.13.
(Lab) #show ap debug mgmt-frames
Traced 802.11 Management Frames
-------------------------------
Timestamp stype SA DA BSS signal Misc
--------- ----- -- -- --- ------ ----
May 21 13:47:04 deauth 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 00:18:de:8a:1b:fb 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 15 STA has left and is deauthenticated
May 21 13:46:56 auth 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 00:18:de:8a:1b:fb 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 15 Success
May 21 13:46:56 auth 00:18:de:8a:1b:fb 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 00:0b:86:c1:9b:21 44 -