Controllerless Networks

Just wanted to share this bit of knowledge with the community after I encountered a strange issue today that still has me scratching my head.

Deployed IAPs in a warehouse setting with small office.  Using Avaya 3641 headsets with IAP 104s.   Was having difficulty getting the phones to connect back to the call server, phone always showed the error message AP not found, or something to that effect.

No matter what I did: make a open ssid, set the ssid to be 2.4GHz only, update firmware on the phones, allow all role-based  PEF rule, I received the same error message on the phones. 

I wound up having to create specific PEF rules to allow TCP/UDP on port 1719 and a rule allowing all svp service to any destinations and the phones came right up.  Now I wrote two rules in there at once so I am not sure you actually need both of them, I should have removed one and see if it works to figure out which one I actually needed to make them work.

What has me scratching my head is I had a role-based blanket allowall rule previously setup on this SSID but it didn't work until I wrote these specific rules.    I guess allowall truely doesn't mean allowall anymore?

Hope this helps some folks in the future.

I managed to get these working by using the 117.058 firmware from http://support.avaya.com 

On the IAP make sure the SSID is a Voice SSID.

On the phone:

 -change the QoS to be WiFi standard (instead of SVP)

 -change CAC to be Optional instead of Mandatory

This was on WPA2-PSK network.  I have not tried any WPA2-Ent networks yet.

I had good quality audio and handoffs were noticeable but well within the acceptable range.

Interesting.  I didn't have to make the SSID, "Voice", and have all the Voice algorithims enabled,  and had to specifically allow svp traffic.  Maybe by changing the QoS on the phone you don't have to write PEF rules.  Customer is only using 3-4 phones total and don't have more than 15 devices total spread amongst 15 APs so not a high demand for network resources.

Changing the phone QoS mode removes the need for SVP all together.  It should make a difference.

I am deploying a handful of Avaya 3641 phones at the moment over a couple of IAP105s and I have found the " No Net Found No APs " error message is used to indicate that the phone can't find the entered SSID (beware of the default allcaps when entering the SSID on the phone).

I'm quite confident that changing to a more restrictive role would not have fixed your issue, could it be that you had the ssid wrong?

I'm Using: 

-WPA2-PSK, I tried WPA2-Ent but my radius server is setup for peap auth etc so PSK for me.

-ssid: voip

-ssid type: voice (which is the same as employee bar some QOS, if you aren't deploying QOS then voice and emplyee have no difference as far as I know)

-Role: Allow all - Only assigned to devices using a mac address starting with 00907a (first half of all 3641s), otherwise deny all

-Reg. Domain: 01 (I'm in Australia)

-QoS: SVP 

ummm yeah, a little off topic but heopfully helpful.