Higher Education

Hello everyone.  A little background on where I'm at.  I'll refer to our network as a smaller network, 170ish closets, 220ish switches, 650ish AP105's.   We've had an Aruba wireless solution in place for 3 years now, 3 M3's in a master local local configuration.  This summer we refreshed the wired network, added a pair of 7220's and implemented all s3500's at the edge.  To top it all off we migrated our NAC solution from Bradford networks to Clearpass.

So.....on to the main problem which I'm running into.  What I'll refer to as legacy devices, once they go to sleep or are inactive and hit that tunnel timeout value, the tunnel collapses, and cannot be re-established as the device won't generate any more traffic.  I'm seeing this with Security DVR's, HVAC Controls, and the worst and most user impacting is printers.

For the printers, I've tried to disable sleep mode, however it appears to be hard coded into the printer and cannot be disabled on most.  Next thought was to use our monitoring system, Airwaves or SCOM to ping the device every few minutes to keep the printer from going to sleep.  This however proved not to be enough and the printers still go to sleep.  

I'm being told that this is supposedly being addressed in 6.3, the tunnel timeout value is modifiable per role, and I'm also being told that they hope to have it out to GA by the end of the month, however my student body returns the end of the week and classes start next Monday,  So.....if anyone has any ideas, throw them out there, I'm all ears on this one.

Thanks in advance,

Scott

how would this work in a non controller environment? if the printer goes to sleep and never sends any more traffic how would a device wanting to print initiate/wake up the device?    As I understand it devices that go into a power-saving sleep mode - is supposed to notify the AP they are in sleep mode - so the AP/controller can buffer when there is traffic for the sleeping device....  the sleeping device is correspondingly committing to wake-up enough periodically to check to see if anything is pending for them....  but then there are many ways that are out there to handle power save conditions

I'd look to see how the printers/devices would wake up in a simple single fat ap ssid environment - then make sure that method will pass in the controllers vap... ie perhaps multicast/broadcast will need to be enabled / some form of client to client communication specifically allowed if blocked...

you've also make a few changes - assuming this was working before do you know if it broke after changing to new hardware s3500 (so I guess I made an assumption that you were using wireless printers? - could be wired on the s3500's? and being tunneled to the controller)  or is it something specific to the change to clearpass?

if they are tunneld on the S3500's I'd imagine the same issues as for wireless hold true... need to make sure wake-on lan broadcast etc will be flooded to the nodes that need to hear it etc....