Wireless Access

Anyone using vocera badges having a problem with badges displaying "searching for AP" or "searching for Network"?  We are running 6.2.1.5 firmware on our controllers and it seems to be happening across the enterprise, not just one location.  It seems once we reboot the AP, the problem goes away.  I do have a case opened with TAC, I was just curious if anyone else is having the same issue.

What are you using for authentication ?

WPA2 AES Pre shared key.

Anyone using the Vocera badges that are in healthcare?

We have a few in DoD but they are using WPA2-TLS. We make sure to enable OKC and Validate PMKID, but I'm not sure that would apply in your case. 

This was working fine before and then you upgraded and had issues or is this a new deployment?

From a very old email, on our initial deployment for the pilot, we had a lot of SFS issues

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How many lost VPINGs will trigger a SFS?

Per our docs containing badge ping behavior:

Searching for Server (SFS) is displayed on the badge¹s screen when the

badge is associated with a wireless AP but is not able to communicate

with the Vocera server.  It is accompanied by the LED on the top of the

badge flashing red.   Every 30 seconds the Vocera client sends a

keep-alive packet (an application layer ping) to the Vocera server.  If

the Vocera client does not receive an acknowledgement (Ack) from the

Vocera server it will send a retry after 500ms. The Vocera client will

retry ten times at 500ms intervals for a total of 11 attempts. If it

does not receive a confirmation from the Vocera server it displays

Searching for Server and the LED will  blinking red.

Common issues for SFS:

€             Transmit Power Asymmetry

€             High Channel/AP utilization

€             Interference

€             Malfunctioning AP

€             ARP Resolution

€             Vocera Server is not Active

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In our case, none of the above was the issue, the contorller and APs were working fine, but the badges needed some additional settings enabled (like Multicast for one). One thing to look at is the show datapath session table for one of the badges having issues to see if the required ports/protocols are fully open...Once we got everything configured, it all worked fine.

Hi Donna,

I need Vocera to run a SFS and SFAP report.   This will determine the timeline and the frequency of these events.

For a network that has been optomized for Vocera,   I would have to look for  a change in the environment.

Thanks,

--Kevin