Network Management

First off, lets get the disclaimer out of the way.   We are very new to the Airwave / Aruba scene when it comes to wireless and switches.  If I ask something dumb, please hold it against me... haha.

Anyways to the questions.

I actually waited to ask this question after I got 7.7.2 installed in the off change that the new version fixed our problem.  I don't remember this happening with 7.6.3

Every now and again all of our IAPS including the VC will show offline in Airwave.  There is no specific time that this happens and it seems to cycle through our buildings(We have 9 locations).  I've also been getting some reports of clients getting randomly disconnected from the wireless.  I can't say with 100% certainty that the times directly relate to Airwave reporting that location down though.

My question is has anyone experienced this issue in the past?  The switches that I have configured in Airwave NEVER show down randomly.  I see no errors on any of the switch ports or in our WAN connections to each building that would cause this.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

Kenny Milan

Dyer County Schools

Technology Director

These are best tracked by opening a support case.  This way you'll have a dedicated contact focused on your issue.  Easy way is to send email to support@arubanetworks.com

Things to look at:

- double check VC https timeout (Groups list -> select group that VC is in -> Basic tab -> Aruba Instant setting box)

- what's the time frames of the reported events (on the VC and AP monitor pages, look at the event log at the bottom of the page)

- check for any communication problems between the IAPs and AMP over port 443.  any network inconsistencies or latency issues?

Rob,

Thanks for the quick response. 

1.  I checked the https timeout and it was set at 1 minute.  I'm assuming that is the default time.

2.  The event log shows down and up in the same second in the report.  It seems a little fishy to me.

3.  I don't think this is an https issue because I lose the local VC on the network that the Airwave box is on included remote sites.  All of our sites are 1Gb fiber with now firewalls or content filtering between them.

I changed the https timeout to 5 minutes just to see if it still reports Down/Up like the log above shows.

If it does it at 5 minutes, I will put in a support request as you suggested.

Sounds good to me.  Please update this thread if it turns out that increasing the timeout was the solution.

How often does the iAP check in with Airwave?

I have the impression that it's longer than 1 minute -- perhaps setting the timeout to twice the check-in interval?

The messages inbound at a minute interval, but processing of the payloads sometimes takes longer than the minute.  The timing increases based on amount of data needed to process across the allocated processing threads (see AMP Setup -> General tab -> Performance box -> Monitoring Processes)

Just wanted to post here and say that setting the delay to 5 minutes seems to fix the problem.

Thanks all for your help.

Did the change fix the problem or mask and underlying problem. We were seeing the same issue, but it turned out to be a spanning tree problem. Can I ask what switches are you using.

I've the same problem and the time out for HTTPS is at 5 minutes and the IAP still goes down random and it take more than 2 to 4 hour to get online "UP" - notice: there are no network problems,

Wed Sep 7 13:00:06 2016     System     Device     Aruba AP 103 mpt-mpico-iap-01 Status changed to 'Virtual Controller is Down'
Wed Sep 7 13:00:06 2016     System     Device     Aruba AP 103 mpt-mpico-iap-01 Down     
Wed Sep 7 13:00:06 2016     System     Device     Aruba Instant Virtual Controller mpt-mpico-vc-01 Status changed to 'Virtual Controller has not checked in for more than 5 minutes'
Wed Sep 7 13:00:06 2016     System     Device     Aruba Instant Virtual Controller mpt-mpico-vc-01 Down

Please open a TAC case.  We would only be guessing about the myriad of things that could be causing your problem.  The post before yours was 3 years ago and might not be valid for your circumstances.  TAC would help narrow your issue down.

Was a solution found to this please?  I have the identical issue, have increased the HTTPS timeout in Airwave to 10 mins and set the HTTPS discovery to 120s.  I've run a packet capture on the VC / Master AP and can see the TCP handshake but then it resets.  Looking at the event log in Airwave I see the following behaviour;

08:14 down 27 mins

08:41 up 13 mins

08:54 down 1hr 7 mins

10:01 up 14 mins

10:15 down 27 mins

10:42 up 13 mins

10:55 down 1hr 7 mins

12:02 up 14 mins

12:16 down 27 mins

12:43 up 13 mins

12:56 down 1hr 7 mins

14:03 up 14 mins

14:17 down 26 mins

14:43 up 14 mins

14:57 down 1hr 7 mins

16:04 up 

Interesting that there's a clear pattern here with the up and down times. On our perimeter firewall we can see HTTPS traffic from the Master IAP to Airwave every 4 mins.

The IAP discovery was perfectly stable for many months until we upgraded the IAP firmware from v6.5.4.2 to v6.5.4.5 in May this year. Since then the discovery has been intermittent.  I've had a TAC case open since May - no solution yet.  The Airwave appliance is on a VM which I've completely re-installed and configured from scratch.  Following the re-build, initially the discovery was stable for approx 10 days after which it started up again. 

One point to note is that there is a VPN between the IAPs gateway Cisco router and a Checkpoint firewall - behind which Airwave sits, however the switch discovery in Airwave via SNMPv3 is perfectly stable. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone,

I would like to know who has / had this problem if they found any solution. As well as any response from Aruba regarding open tickets.

I have a client with the same problem.

I appreciate the help.

Regards