Wireless Access

Hello everyone,

We have about 180 users with remote APs in my company. Everything works fine for everyone except one user who for some reason  keeps losing the SSIDs on his RAP. He works from home once a week and lately he calls everyday he's working from home to report that his laptop is no longer showing any of our SSIDs. A reboot of the RAP seems to resolve this but we are stumped.

All the LEDs are lit and green when this is happening. A look at the "arm history" shows power increases, occassional error threshold exceeded messages  and a channel change here and there nothing to worry about. The logs show other APs in the vicinity as interfering but they are on a different channel from the RAP.

We issued him a new RAP and the same problem is beginning to creep up on this one.

Any ideas?

Does the problem just happen to that specific laptop?

Does the user has other laptops at home in which he can tell you that well all the laptops here CANT see the SSIDs...

Or it just that laptop in particular? if its that laptop in particular  i would update the drivers of the laptop wireless card

I dont think its the rap as you said you send him a new one and the problem persist...

NightShade,

You raise a very valid point. I'm not sure if he has more than 1 laptop but I'll ask.

The interesting thing is that the same laptop that he uses at home works perfectly fine at work (it's a work-issued laptop). He connects to the same SSID at work with no problems whatsoever. But when he's home it's a different story. I'm leaning on interferance from somewhere.

Well check the interference on the RAP

show ap active ip-addr <ap ip address>

Check to make sure:

• Channel Frame Retry Rate % is below 30%. If higher then too much interference.

• Channel Noise Floor is above 80. If Noise Floor is lower then too much non-802.11 interference

Another thing you should tell him

When he disconnect is someone is using  a wireless phone? or an microwave oven near?

IF you see how much interference a wireless phone and a microwave oven do you will be REALLY surprised...I show this to clients always with a fluke airchecker i have and they get surprised as well...

NightShade1,

I'll run those commands the next time he'll work from home in 2 weeks. Thanks for your help.

YEah but also ask the user that if he is using a wireless phone when he gets that problem or if a microwave oven is working at that time when he has this issue...

Im telling you this becasue if you check the interference it does on a airchecker  it does soo much interference that almost all the channels get almost 100% of utlization in just noise...

Will do...thanks.

If you can get connected to the RAP either via a wired connection or via another machine connected to the SSID visit rapconsole.arubanetworks.com and you can see if the SSID is up, can it see the clients, run diagnostics and so on.

Interestingly the user said he's had no problems in last 2 weeks. According to him, the only thing he changed was to move the WAN connection on the RAP2 from his FIOS modem to the router behind the modem. He hasn't had a problem since then.

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@just4now88 wrote:

Interestingly the user said he's had no problems in last 2 weeks. According to him, the only thing he changed was to move the WAN connection on the RAP2 from his FIOS modem to the router behind the modem. He hasn't had a problem since then.

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just4now88,

Accept the victory! ;)