Controllerless Networks

Hey guys, I need your help. I will see if Nox will add some more information. 

Thank you Sean!

We have three IAP-93 units that have been running fine for a few months. Seemingly out of the blue we've had problems with DHCP and/or connectivity between access points and their clients.

I'll elaborate on the IT department's access point since I used it as a testbed for a firmware update. Sadly the firmware update did NOT fix the problem.

I've done several factory resets on this thing (unplug AP, hold down reset pin, plug AP in, release pin after 5 seconds (also tried 10 seconds)). I'll get the "instant" network broadcasting and I can connect to it, but I am not issued an IP. In the web interface (over the wired interface) I see the client listed with an IP of 0.0.0.0

Sometimes I'll get a seemingly-valid IP address, but then as I look at my network settings (in Mac OS 10.9) I will see the IP literally vanish in front of my eyes, to be replaced by a self-assigned 169.x.x.x address.

If I manually assign the IP that was given to me briefly I cannot ping the access point over the wireless connection.

I have this AP on a subnet that is shared with no other Aruba access points. It is set to receive a fixed IP address from our main DHCP server, and that seems to work without issue.

The expected behavior is for the access points to run an internal DHCP server and NAT out from them with zero configuration. This does not seem to be happening.

Thank you very much for any assistance!

Here's a screenshot of what happens immediately after a factory reset.

Where are the devices recieving an IP from? Or are they the only devices on site?

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@Jamie E wrote:

Where are the devices recieving an IP from? Or are they the only devices on site?

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The access points are receiving their IPs from our DNS/DHCP/LDAP servers. The wireless clients are receiving their IPs directly from the access points.

First, no response when pinging the IAP when on the Instant SSID is normal.   The "instant" role has these permissions (ICMP is not one of them).

When you try to browse to a site, do you get the Instant WebUI?   Are you getting a valid DNS server on your client from the IAP?  If not, try browsing to http://1.1.1.1 (does it load the WebUI)?

Is your IAP managed by AirWave or Central?  Is Activate making any changes to the IAP provisioning-wise?

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@clembo wrote:

First, no response when pinging the IAP when on the Instant SSID is normal.   The "instant" role has these permissions (ICMP is not one of them).

 

 

When you try to browse to a site, do you get the Instant WebUI?   Are you getting a valid DNS server on your client from the IAP?  If not, try browsing to http://1.1.1.1 (does it load the WebUI)?

 

Is your IAP managed by AirWave or Central?  Is Activate making any changes to the IAP provisioning-wise?

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Good to know about the ICMP permission. Thanks!

When I try to browse to an external site or the web interface of the access point I get a timeout. Nothing loads.

We don't have AirWave or Central. Just three Instant access points. At the moment two are in production with old firmware and one is out of production for testing with the latest firmware.

Okay so I've deduced some new information. Before I mention that though, let me give some basic info on our infrastructure.

We have two subnets/VLANs: let's call them 1 and 2. 1 is the "main" network with two IAP-93 units running with fairly default configurations. 2 is a secondary network that was created when 1 ran out of addresses. I have been trying to get the IT access point to run on the 2 network and have been getting the problems described above.

Last night I took this AP home and slapped it on my home network. None of the issues described above occurred. So there must be some sort of conflict going on somewhere on my work network.

The frustrating part of this is that I've tried manually specifying a DHCP scope or range to see if that resolves this issue but my laptop keeps getting assigned the same address, totally ignoring whatever I've set for a local scope. I've also set a network in the DHCP server settings; that is also ignored.

At the moment the two production access points seem to be working fine.

I was not involved in the purchase or initial configuration of these access points, so I'm quite new to these things. The person that set these up is no longer with the company so I'm scrambling trying to figure this out, which involves learning the system on the fly. Thank you very much for your help and patience!