Controllerless Networks

I've got a brand new deployment I'm working on and it's my first time using Instant. I've got 5x IAP-103's & a 7005. In this scenario the 7005 is purely acting as a router/firewall. All IAP's are running instant mode. I'm able to bring up a new AP, provision a new SSID and then I'm able to connect to that SSID succesfully. The issue I'm having is that when I cahnge the IAP's address to static and then change then configure the virtual controller IP (different IP) I lose connectivity & it never comes back. Whats really strange is that I can still access the SSID through this one AP, but cannot ping any of hte addresses associated with that IAP. Thoughts?

 

Is there a procedure specifically for configuring the virtual controller IP? Do I need to bring up the other IAP's in the cluster before configuring it? Is there an issue with changing an IAP's address from dynamic to static?

#7005

Could you share with us the IP address and mask of the static IPs configured and the VC IP that was configured as well?

Thanks,

Yan Liu
Product Manager
Aruba Instant
US: +1 650 996-3520
China: +86 136 2121 6844

The virtual controller IP was going to be 192.168.60.10 & the IAP's were 192.168.60.11-15. All /24 subnet. I beet my head on this for hours and finally gave up. I converted them all to campus AP's. Honestly, I'll probably never mess with Instant again. It was a nightmare & completely unreliable. 

Another incredibly frustrating thing about the Instant AP's was that the Instant SSID was not automatically loading a portal to configure after associating with the "Instant" SSID. I realize some OS's don't play well with that, but even after launching a browser & trying to navigate directly to "http://instant.arubanetworks.com" it would not load. This would go on for 20-30 minutes EACH. Eventually, I got wise & just used the IP address. That was better, but still extremely flaky.

 

While I'm on my soap box I'll mentoin that the tehcnical documentation for Instant is extremely lacking. There are so many configuration best practices & intricacies of this system that aren't clearly documented at all. It's very hard for an engineer like myself to plan & design these networks without clear documentation.

I am very sorry to hear that you did not have a good experience with our product. Regarding your experience on the static IP and VC IP configuration, may I ask why the VC IP is designed to be in a different subnet from the APs themselves? While this can be done, it is rather advanced configuration and not typical, so I am curious to understand the usage requirements behind it.

I am also concerned that you did not have a good experience with our ?instant.arubanetworks.com? domain. Could you share some information about the OS and browser you were using? Could there been any virtual machines or VPN clients (including Aruba?s VIA client) that were running on your PC?

Thanks,

Yan Liu
Product Manager
Aruba Instant
US: +1 650 996-3520
China: +86 136 2121 6844

Thanks, Yin. I'm not sure what you mean by the subnet. The VC & AP's are all in the same subnet. (192.16.60.0 /24).

 

I was using a Windows 8.1 machine. I tried switching back & forth betwen Chrome 36.0 & Internet Explorer 11. I noticed at times I had to clear my cache every single time I tried a different IAP. Not sure if that is coincidental or not. No VM's or VIA at all. 

 

Here is a little more info about the situation. Prior to converting the IAP's to campus AP's, I was seeing IAP's just randomly drop off the network for several minuts & then they would come back for a while. I don't believe they were rebooting during this time. I would have consoled into them, but the 103 doesn't have a RJ45 console port & the appropriate console cable wasn't included (another bad idea). Lastly, I was having problems getting DHCP to work for my clients when authenticating WPA2-PSK to the IAP. The DHCP server was a 7005 controller on the exact same VLAN. After converting to campus AP, I had absolutely no DHCP problems at all.

I apologize for the confusion reagrding the VC IP subnet.. I misread the IP address in the previous post.

 

Based on the information you provided, I believe the network you had was running into some kind of cluster control traffic loss.  Since the network is no longer running in instant mode, it is not easy to root cause this, but I will give it a try.  Do you remember that the issues was always there, or only after static IP and/or VC IP were configured?  How was the network behaving when it was using DHCP?  I am assuming that, initially, the IAPs were getting an IP from the DHCP server on the controller as you described?

I was still in the staging process, so at that time all of the IAP's were connected to the same switch & in the same VLAN. The default-gateway & DHCP server was an Aruba 7005 being used purely as a router/firewall. Once converted to Campus AP's, the topology was the same & DHCP worked fine.

 

Initially I had all of the IAP's running at once. I could connect to the WPA2 SSID, but I was not getting an IP address. If I hard-coded the IP address on my laptop, I had connectivity, but was frequently getting packet loss.

 

Later on, I removed all IAP's & started over. This time I only added the IAP one at a time. They came up, but as soon as I changed the IAP to a static IP, I lost connectivity & had to reset them.