Wireless Access

Hey guys I am part of the technology team at a school district here in oregon, we recently switched over our entire wireless system to a controller with 105s and 125s. We decided to get a few 93s to cover some of the non critical areas and they have been giving us issues. People are complaining about random disconnects and when we go visit the computer it is showing a big red x instead of a wireless signal (most of the end machines are windows 7 boxes). We have tried deleting the wireless profile on the machine and re-adding the ap and this fixes it temporarily. These are flashed with the same config as the 105s and 125s we have deployed that are running very stable can anyone point me in the right direction as to what I need to do to get these up and running reliably? 

What version of ArubaOS?

 

How many users are on that WLAN?

 

Are you dropping broadcasts on all Virtual APs?

 

Are wired and wireless clients sharing the same VLAN?

 

1) Aruba OS 6.1.3.1

2) 5-6 on the 93 ap, 60-100 users on the entire WLAN

3) No, just the 93

4) Yes.

 

Thank you for your time :)

You need to make sure that drop broadcast and multi cast is enabled on the virtual aps. This will help with the fact that wireless clients are severely degraded by having clients in the same vlan.

Do they disconnect when they are roaming from 125 & 105 APS to the 93aps?

 

Or they are connected to the AP 93 and suddenlty they get disconnected?

Had some similar issues with the AP-93.

 

The AP 93 is a single radio AP. If you are using Band Steering you could try to switch this of in the areas where the AP 93 is deployed. 

I dont know if the issue is when they are switching between aps or not, most of the teachers walk around our entire building and need wifi, regardless of where they are. So that could be part of the problem is switching between different band radios. if thats the case that 105s dont mesh seemlessly with the 93s we just wasted about 1k on 93s.

It should not disconnect when it roams to a different access point period. Having wired and wireless clients in the same subnet is a serious cause of connectivity issues. Please either separate the clients and/or turn on broadcast multicast filtering on the virtual access point profile and try again.

Collin question regarding this

Wouldnt they disconnect if they are connected on 5tghz band on ap 105 and then they move to an ap 93 which is just working on 2.4ghz?

Yes, but it should be seamless.

Hey guys I made sure that band steering was disabled and I couldnt find the settings for drop broadcast and multicast, anyone know where they are? Thank you.

Here you go  look at the left side broadcast multicast,  you should enable broadcast filtering on this example its disable

Also dont worry about the ARP and DHCP as all the IAP drops all broadcast and multicast frames except

for DHCP and ARP

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@NightShade1 wrote:

Here you go  look at the left side broadcast multicast,  you should enable broadcast filtering on this example its disable

Also dont worry about the ARP and DHCP as all the IAP drops all broadcast and multicast frames except

for DHCP and ARP

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Nightshade1 that is for IAP.  This is a controller-based deployment.

heh... i don tknow why i though it was an instant.. ill upload the correct one... in a min with the controller thanks for telling

Okay here is the contorller based one...

you go to configuration-->ap group --->click edit on the ap group in which the aps are on --->profile --> wireless lan ---> Virtual APS

 

Here is a picture...

Now remeber you need to do it in all virtual APS you got... at least in my lab controller i got 4 virtual APs... so i put it to all of them... But well i dont need any multicast in my enviroment.  Also check Convert Broadcast ARP requests to unicast

Also you will get a warning of Warning: broadcast-filter arp should be enabled with this option. Otherwise ARP requests will be dropped!  So enable that before enabling this... you will see that option on advanced services on stateful firewall(which is on the left menu)

 

Thanks for the info and the screenshots they helped alot, we are tinkering now, I will get back to you guys for results thank you!

 

Hello guys I figured I would post back with an update, Arubas are running very solid, and now switching seamlessly between the 105s and the 93s. The issue was not with aruba at all it was because we had a stray ap that we forgot to replace. The old ap had a different type of encryption then what we have set up on the arubas and for some reason clients were prefering to go to our old ap instead of the new aruba. Anyways we removed the old ap and replaced it with an aruba 93 and everything is working very well and running very smooth. Thank you all for the help but this ended up being on our end! Thank you!