We have a hotel here with two Aruba WiFi controllers and 200+ access points. Whenever an AP gets restarted - no matter the reason - there is about 10% chance it will not appear on the controller again. Since all APs are powered by PoE from HP access switches, it's relatively easy to power-cycle them remotely. After that some APs make the connection again. Others are more resistant and does not "wake up" no matter how many times they are restarted. But after I leave them alone for couple days they somehow magically make the connection again.
During this "down" period they can be pinged from the controller and shows up in the ARP table with correct MAC address. However no WiFi signals are transmitted - which kind of makes sense, but creates a problem of "holes" in signal coverage.
Logs on the controller are full of all kinds of warning messages, but nothing seems to be related to "unable establish a connection" or anything like that. (Or I just don't know what to look for.)
Last week there was some kind of software upgrade or something and AP's started to restart on their own. After a few hours of isolating the problematic APs and restarting them, we were left with about 25 APs in this diminished working state. We tried a configuration reset on a couple of them - that worked. I was able to put them back in the correct group and after that they worked fine. However I'd say that it can be used only as last resort since some APs are tucked in so deep into the ceiling that reaching one would take hours. And if it's in a populated guest room - it's just plain not possible.
I've searched the internet as well as any articles/discussions here for couple months now with no luck.
Recently I just found the option to enable telnet on the APs, but I haven't had a chance to find an AP which has received this new config and can't connect to the controller.
- Is this a known problem somewhere? Or perhaps an expected behaviour?
- What commands can I run on an AP to diagnose this? (Most of what I've tried so far returns "permission denied".)
Controllers are Aruba7210 with software version 6.4.3.4.
APs are all model 205.