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Access network design for branch, remote, outdoor, and campus locations with HPE Aruba Networking access points and mobility controllers.
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Idle timeout should be driven by STM for MAC

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  • 1.  Idle timeout should be driven by STM for MAC

    Posted Sep 05, 2014 07:59 AM

    i was going through some user debug logs and saw the following lines:

     

    Sep  3 16:54:49  authmgr[2021]: <522246> <DBUG> |authmgr|  Idle timeout should be driven by STM for MAC aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff.
    Sep  3 16:54:29  authmgr[2021]: <522247> <DBUG> |authmgr|  User idle timer removed for user with  MAC aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff.

     

    is that normal? if the STM (what does it stand for?) drives the idle timeout, what is the idle time out then?



  • 2.  RE: Idle timeout should be driven by STM for MAC

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Sep 05, 2014 11:02 AM

    Boneyard,

    These two log entries relate to how we handle users aging out of the system. STM stands for Station Management and it is a control plane process in Controllers and APs. Prior to 6.2, idle timeout was handled by a different process and after that it was handled by STM to improve scalability.

     

    So there are two timers at play here:

     

    • Station timeout period which is a setting under “wlan ssid-profile <name>”. The default is 1000 seconds.
    • Idle timeout period is a setting under “aaa timer”. The default is 300 seconds.

    In 6.4.1 we also have some aaa-profile timers to override the global aaa but let's put that aside for this discussion.

     

    There are two predominate situations where these come into play.

     

    Client sends a disassociate from an AP.

    --> In this situation, once the client dis-associates, the user will age out according to the aaa idle timer.

     

    Client doesn't send a disassociate but stops sending traffic (e.g. walks away)

    --> In this situation, the client will age out according to the station timeout.

     

    Now going to your specific log entries, these are typically seen during user creation. I suspect if we had the full log set, we would see a "Station UP" event preceding these messages. Is that the case?

     

    Best regards,

     

    Madani