Wireless Access

Hi

I am helping out a primary school who had an Aruba IAP-105 system installed about 4 years ago, the system comprises of about 14 APs.

There are 7 APs at each end of the school connected to a local switch, the two sides of the school are then linked using 1GB copper between the switches.

One of the issues they have is that when they have ~60 laptops running the wireless network regularily crashes and everything needs to be power cycled.

We have just got the username/password from the old supplier and found that it is running version 6.1.3.0-3.0.0 - presumably a good starting point would be to upgrade this to the latest version?

I read something about band steering, our Aruba's are currently set for:

band-steering-mode prefer-5ghz

Should we change this to better balance the laptops across the channels?

Anything else we should be looking at?

You should probably start by upgrading the code here:  http://support.arubanetworks.com/LifetimeWarrantySoftware/tabid/121/DMXModule/661/Default.aspx?EntryId=20388

Next, you should take a look at the article here:    http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Technology-Blog/Removing-the-Bottleneck-in-Wireless/ba-p/77978 to see if it can give you any ideas about your current situation..

We are going to upgrade Friday morning, would you suggest going with:

ArubaInstant_Orion_6.4.2.6-4.1.1.13_5491

or

ArubaInstant_Orion_6.4.4.4-4.2.3

ArubaInstant_Orion_6.4.4.4-4.2.3

Good afternoon

I did the upgrade this morning and things initially did not go to plan and when the VIrtual Controller came back up none of the APs would connect.  After many hours and a reboot of the PoE switches (forcing the APs to reboot) most (11) of the APs connected back to the VIrtual Controller but 2 of them just refused.

I tried resetting one of them but it still refused to Auto Join.

The other seems to be in some sort of reboot cycle.

Any thoughts on what to check?

I've also discovered (though its not obvious at all!) that our system is in fact the Dell W-IAP105 - will the image i used have caused some of these issues or is it still fine?