Wireless Access

My WLAN clients are experiancing instable network connection. They are disconnected from the network and sometimes they have to manually reconnect or sometimes even disable and re-enable the Wireless Interface before it reconnects to the network. I therefore debugged some of the clients and below is some of the debug results. Can someone explain what is wrong from the debug below: Thanks in advance:

I would like to know what the issue was and the resolution on this.

thanks,

Carlos

Still not found a permanent solution. But if you are in the same situation, try varying the rates and reducing the power, then monitor the performance to see if it suits your environment.

On 6.4.2.x, we have found that after a certain amount of runtime (weeks to months, I guess it probably varies depending on your client load) users will start to report disconnects, and if you look into it you may find that what is really happening is that certain devices will only connect to certain APs, but will reconnect to a particular AP for a while if you reboot that AP.  If you find this, a wholesale reboot of both the controllers and all APs is in order.  We just upgraded from 6.4.2.3 to 6.4.2.5 and we'll see if this bahavior returns in a month or two.

We see similar behaviour to APs.

- We identify this when we see zero clients connected, while adjacent APs have many users.
Eg. In a lecture theatre with four APs, two of them have 50-70 clients and the other two zero.

- We can see a specific message repeated on the AP
#show ap remote debug mgmt-frames ap-name "xxx"
May 1 14:19:11 deauth 00:11:22:33:44:55 01:23:45:67:89:0a 00:11:22:33:44:55 15 Denied: AP Ageout (seq num 0)

- We verify by rebooting the AP and have more than 20 users connecting immediately afterwards

TAC case open

Note that just rebooting an AP and saying "hey look it has lots of clients now" is not a good test because it comes up with hot radios until ARM gets around to telling it what to do, but the syslog message is definitively known issue #116348; see the release notes.

We get about 90 days runtime between seeing this or similar issues.  When we start seeing them, we reboot the whole system at the earliest off-hours opportunity, because we've seen APs refuse to allow certain clients to connect while serving other clients, there isnt always a "Denied" syslog message to identify the affected APs, once it starts happenning it can return in a few days to the same AP, and we have better things to do with our staff time than try to hunt down which APs are in trouble.

Nuke it from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.

bjulin,

   Did upgrading solve this problem for you?  We are currently on 6.2.4.3 code and we are seeing some that sound exactly like what you were seeing.  The next time it occurs, I will look at some of the commands you guys listed and see if it is in fact the same problem.  At one site I rebooted everything (controller and all APs) and at another where the problem just happened for the first time yesterday, I have yet to reboot so I can still monitor it.

Thanks for any updates!

McFly

Hi, yes upgrading OS fixed it.

Too which version?

We have been chasing this around for months. No one seems to know what the actual issue is. We are running 6.4.2.12. It is only affecting intel NIC cards, not MAC devices. Anyone find an OS that is stable?

jodipratt74,

This is a very old thread and there are many different things that could cause clients to disconnect.

What you could do is open your own thread and the specifics of your situation, so others can offer suggestions tailored to your issue.

Colin, Thank you. I am going through one of your old threads now. I don't know how I didn't see these before. Starting with power management that you suggested. Believe we have a density issue. If your other suggusetions don't work, I will open a new thread. Thanks!