Greetings fellow Airheads,
One of our schools has two AP-175s being used in a mesh configuration. One is located on top of a main campus building and is hard-wired to the network, and is configured as a Mesh Portal. The other is out in the Football pressbox, and is configured as a Mesh Point. I initially configured both APs in an office, at opposite ends, about 30 feet apart, using WPA2 encryption on the "a" channel. Worked great. When the APs were installed, however, the Point wouldn't connect to the Portal. Several attempts to wipe and reprovision the Point were unsuccessful. Our SE was on-site today, and he tried changing the encryption in the Mesh Cluster Profile from WPA2 to open. Wadayaknow, the Point connected!
My SE had to leave for another appointment. Never being one to leave well-enough alone, I decided to try to make it work with WPA2. This is what I did:
- Changed the Mesh Cluster Profile settings to use WPA2 and put in a passphrase.
- Hit "Apply", and got the expected response from the controller saying that the AP would need to be reprovisioned before they would see the change.
- Hit "Save Configuration" and waited a few minutes to ensure that the changes propagated from the master controller to all local controllers. (Master is at our District Office; I was working at a school site.)
- Reprovisioned the Point first (running under the assumption that if I reprovisioned the Portal first, I would no longer be able to get to the Point, so I did the Point first).
- Waited a few minutes for the Point to reboot. As expected, I did not see it come back up.
- Reprovisioned the Portal second.
- Waited a few minutes for the Portal to come back up, which it did.
After the Portal came back up, though, the Point never showed up. I ended up having to wipe its configuration again, change the Cluster profile back to open, and then bring the Point back up and provision it again. It works this way, but I don't like having an unencrypted backhaul.
We have a similar setup at another school, but with AP-85s, and that one works great. Considering that the AP-175 setup originally worked with encryption enabled, I'm wondering if it could be a distance factor? The distance between the Portal and the Point is less than the length of a football field. The other school's setup works over a distance *longer* than a football field. Could there be something I missed? Has anyone run into this before?
Thanks!