Hello,
We have a customer having trouble with a device (a Brother HL-2135W printer with wireless connectivity) where it drops off the network after a period of time (the user's words). The printer is pretty woeful when it comes to getting debugging information out of it.
The SSID in use is a special one we provide for use only in that particular customer's network and is in 'forward-mode bridge' (as the traffic stays in the customer network), unlike most of our virtual APs, which are in tunnel mode.
On more careful examination, the printer remains associated (when we look at the 'show ap association ...' list) and has an IP address in 'show user-table mac ...' but doesn't seem to respond to ARP requests from other hosts.
Manually adding the host's ARP entry on another device allows it to work but stops when we remove it again. This makes me think that the device is going into some sort of low power mode where it doesn't respond to broadcast traffic, much as a portable device such as a phone.
I've read the "Optimizing Aruba WLANs for Roaming Devices" Validated Reference Design where this mentions turning ARPs from broadcast into unicast using 'broadcast-filter arp', but this doesn't work.
Does this command only work for tunnelled VAPs, where traffic is processed on the controller, and not bridged VAPs?
(Also, as an aside, what does it do for broadcast ARP packets - do they get turned into a number of unicast packets?)
Are there any other solutions which might work?
I cannot find an option on the printer to disable the printer sleeping its wireless interface. Pinging the printer from a client seems to be OK as I assume the ARP entry is refreshed by unicast periodically, but that only works from a particular client.
Thanks in advance,
- Bob