Controllerless Networks

Hello,

 

Can anyone tell me what this error means exactly? When checking client status on airwave for a particular cluster of iAPs, I'm seeing lots of frames/sec errors flagging up as a possible problem on the SSID.

 

I believe this is something to do with the discovery packets/frames that are sent to the APs, but what would cause too many errors, on the majority of sites there are a few ARM changes due to noise or interference but nothing excessive?!

 

 

Cheers,

 

Danny

Screenshot please.

 

It typically is an alert  for a parameter that has an arbitrary threshold.  The threshold honestly varies from site to site, and could be only one of a number of indicators used to determine site health.

Screensnhot attached... the threshold is set to < 250 /s this one I've just chosen is at 504 /s we have some other sites that show 800+

 

The 250 threshold appears to be across the range of our airwave servers (we run 3 in total for this customer, ~8000+ iAPs deployed across ~1800+ sites), not sure if this is default or something set historically before my time

 

Cheers,

 

Danny

 

That parameter is very subjective and there is no right or wrong number.  If you have 500 errors/sec, but no complaints and that is the number every day that there are no issues, 500 is an okay number.  Again, the number by itself does not really mean anything.  The message is just there to show that the counter exceeds the setting.

The customer uses wireless handheld ordering and payment systems and are complaining (alot) about them dropping off the network and having to reboot the device, and this is occuring across mutliple sites. We haven't fully ruled out a client hardware/software issue but obviously the main focal point is the wireless infrastructure, so just trying to figure out if the frames erroring could be a contributing factor, or if there is some other issue and whether the frames errors could point to it.

 

I appreciate alot of these issues are very environment subjective, so not easy to diagnose in this manner!

 

 

Cheers,

 

Danny

It could definitely be one of the symptoms.

What type of access points do you have deployed?
Are you using encryption?
What clients are connecting on the networks?

The majority is iAP 93's, however the customer is (slowly) upgrading these to iAP 205's, the issues are seen across both types.

 

The SSID they connect to is WPA-2 key encrypted, the clients are typically ipods running a bespoke ordering app, as well as handheld card machines. There is also an open guest wifi network that can have all kinds of clients connecting.

 

 

Cheers,

 

Danny

How many access point are there and how are they mounted?

In the site I used above, there is 4 APs and they are wall and ceiling mounted. Across other sites there's on average 3-4 APs present, again mounted in similar ways

 

 

Cheers,

 

Danny

 

How high are the AP93s mounted?  Do you have a screenshot with the access points channel, power, utilization, noise?