Wireless Access

We are running 7210 controllers in an AP105 environment with OS 6.2.1.5 and are haivng issues with our clients that have Intel adapters. We have about 135 AP's installed and about 100 wireless med carts throughout our hospital. We are seeing freezing, slow response and packet loss with n mode enabled. Ping tests show a dropped ping just about every 8 pings. If we disable n mode on the client adapter, they run stable and no longer freeze or lose pings. We are using Intel driver 15.11.0.7 from January 2014 . Anyone else seeing problems with Intel adapters or have any insight to this issue? Thanks.

#AP135
#7210

If you haven't opened a case, please do so. Thanks

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@SethFiermonti wrote:

If you haven't opened a case, please do so. Thanks

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I will, I'm just in the middle of an unrelated VPN/Firewall issue at the moment and cannot spend a few hours on the phone with tech support right now. Since we are up and running, I just figured I'd post the question to see if anyone else was seeing this. Thanks.

I'm sorry, what was the model# of the intel adapter?

 

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@cjoseph wrote:

I'm sorry, what was the model# of the intel adapter?

 

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We have a few different models, mostly Centrino N105, 6200 AGN, and 7260.

Okay,

 

Do you have "Bonded" channels or 40mhz channels where the channels on the access points show up as 36+ or 40-?

 

Our AP are set to run 40mhz on the .a radio.

vinster789,

 

Is it a high density network?  (tons of devices)  If so, a packet drop every 8 is not that bad, but it could be expected due to wireless being a shared mechanism, depending on your density.  If you instead use 20 mhz channels in a high density environment, you could give yourself more spectrum and better performance.

Our AP deployment is pretty dense, but our client density isn't bad, typically we have less than 8 devices per AP. I can back it down to 20mhz and see if that helps.

Vinster,

 

Let us know how it goes if you decide to change it.  40mhz only gives you 4 non-overlapping channels, so additional contention could be introduced by other access points due to your density.  In addition, you want to :

 

- Make sure that the number of SSIDs you broadcast is low.

- Make sure that "Drop Broadcast and Multicast" is enabled on all of your Virtual APs.

 

The High Density VRD here:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/vrd/HighDensityVRD/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm has additional suggestions in addition to the ones above.

Will do. We only have 3 SSID's and yes, Drop Broadcast and Multicast is enabled. We also use a seaparate VLAN for wireless traffic than wired traffic. Thanks for the help.

Vinster,

 

What operating system, what type of encryption are you using on the wireless?  Are any other devices using this same wireless with these symptoms?

Most of our devices are IBM/Lenovo with Intel adapters. I haven't heard of any issues with Apple devices. The OS is Windows 7 and we are using WPA2 with certificate (machine auth) on a 2008 R2 server.

Are you enabling/disabling "N" mode in the Intel Driver?

yes, disabled it works, enabled it drops packets.

With the 7260 there were some serious performance issues with drivers up until the 16.10 release I believe. I found I had auth and performance issues until they released that driver and after that I saw significant improvement.

tsd25108,

 

That is true that there were issues with some drivers earlier on the Intel 7260 while connecting to 802.11AC access points.  We do have to rule out the environment and see if the adapters still perform that way.  From what the OP is saying, it is occurring with all their devices, so we probably should look at the infrastructure and ensure that is not the source or contributing to the issue.