Controllerless Networks

I'm running 77 205H's in IAP mode in a dorm situationl. I have about 12 networks, most of which are zoned. The version is 6.4.3.0-4.2.0.0_49453. I do not have a prefered master as I figured some better redundancy is in order but yesterday the VC "changed hands" (not sure why the VC changed as all seemed fine with the "old" VC) and soon the config went haywire. Slowly different AP's stopped offering networks. More and more clients that were near enough to the VC started connecting to it instead of other AP's that were a better match. Zone info form half of the AP's was lost so that I had to reenter it for them. That didn't help. I even tried rebooting a few AP's that were clearly not advertising any networks but that didn't change. Finally I decided to reboot the VC inorder to have another AP get elected and sure enough all the settings came back and things returned to normal. This does not inspire confidence ion these new 205H's. I've already found that the DHCP stuff is a mess (I ahve another post on here about that) so that I need to rely on network DHCP without VLAN pools or anything and now it seems some of these AP's are flakey. Apart from using zones I have things setup in a pretty vanilla arrangement and have always had great success with the Controller based systems I use in our main buildings from Aruba but now am second guessing going with the IAP method for our dorms.

Any ideas on what may be happening or where to look? Should I set an AP as the preferred master and hope for the best?

thanks in advance

Steve

With regards to getting a Preferred Master, you should do it.  If it goes down or becomes unavailable, another device is elected master.  If it comes back up, it takes over preemptively.

If you feel your VC changed hands and it should not, you should open a TAC case so that they can determine what happened from your logs.