Wireless Access

Tonight I tried to upgrade our 3400 master standalone controller from 3.4.3.1 to 6.1.2.4.  According to the release notes I needed to upgrade first to 3.4.4.3 then to 6.1.2.4.   I followed this and upgrading to 3.4.4.3 was smooth.  Once I upgraded to 6.1.2.4 the controller was losing pings and had connectivity issues.  Some of the APs also had D and I flags. 

 

I had to revert back to 3.4.4.3 and the issue went away.  I saved a Tech Support file right before downgrading.  Has anyone had these types of issues when upgrading to this code?

#3400

I believe the behavior of spanning-tree on the controller changed. In previous code, PVST was not supported. When upgrading to 6.1.2.0 months ago, spanning-tree broke until we implemented PVST. I believe Aruba fixed this issue by 6.1.2.4 but it could be something to check out. Can you describe "connectivity issues"? In any case, you should definitely open a case if you haven't already.

I've seen those dirty and inactive flags aswell after upgrading.. Gicving them a bit more time has always fixed the 'issue' for me though. Seems they take a bit more time to properly come up but that's all.

The connectivy issues was that the controller was losing every other ping. 

 

After getting replies from this board and doing some searching, Spanning Tree was the issue.  We upgraded the controller again last night and we saw the same issues.  Once we disabled Spanning Tree on the controller, the issues went away.

 

We tried to enable PVST, but once we did so on a VLAN it brought that VLAN down.  We left all Span disabled untilf further testing.

 

Any info on what needs to be done to get PVST working?

This morning we also had an issue where two VLANs were not working.  Users were able to associate to the employee SSID, but were not getting an IP address.  The resolution was to remove/add the VLAN from the trunk port.

 

What is weird is that the only VLANs that were affected are the ones that we enabled/disabled PVST on.

From what I can tell, the way in which you implement PVST in ArubaOS 6.x is important. Here's what I'm doing. Note that the priority is set to ensure that the controller is never ever ever ever ever the root.

 

spanning-tree mode rapid-pvst

spanning-tree vlan x

spanning-tree vlan x priority 65535

spanning-tree vlan y

spanning-tree vlan y priority 65535

spanning-tree vlan z

spanning-tree vlan z priority 65535

....

 

Give that a try and see if that is successful. I'm assuming you lost connectivity having two (redundant) links to your controller. You can try disabling one of the links with PVST enabled on the controller and ensure connectivity persists. Use "show spanning-tree interface <interface>" on the controller and your upstream switches to ensure it has converged correctly (i.e., for each vlan, you should definitively see one of the ports in a blocking state within each vlan's topology).

We ended up just disabling spanning tree all together on the controller.