Wireless Access

I have one issue and one question:

Issue: Mobile devices on my network just "drop" with no warning/reason and rejoin almost immediately. It's very strange. I did a 'debug' on one of them and saw the error "internal ageout". I looked around the rest of the config and found a timeout set to its default at 180 seconds, but this drop is something I can reproduce if I put the phone in the right place in my environment in just a few seconds. I'm not sure where to begin here.

Question: Is there a way to force certain clients (security cameras) to associate to specific aps? For some reason these things are joining aps way too far away and the signal is horrible, when there are mesh nodes something like 5 feet away.

Any advice would be fantastic, and thanks in advance!

It's cranked - as high as it can go. 

I can try turning it down, and seeing what happens.

What is it set at?   Max power creates issues with clients like random disconnects and roaming problems.

both the max and min EIRP was set to 127, so I've changed max to 33 and min to 3, but it appears to have not affected the issue. I still have mobile devices just dropping off the network.

I'm also still trying to sort out how to get certain cameras to only associate with specific radios - I can't find a clear way to do that.

Change the min to 9 and the max to 12 or 15 please.  Every 3 db results in a doubling of power (dbm is logarithmic).  Most mobile devices do not transmit much more than 17 so anything above that makes transmit power very asymetric and it will cause issues.  Most AP are not allowed to transmit more than 23 depending on channel, so changing from 127 to 33 did not make a difference.

Okiedokie. That change has been made.

A and G radios are set to min 9, max 12.

Any ideas on how to force association? I was hoping one could tell the controller something like "these mac addresses should be forced to talk to this radio, specifically"...

That is not possible.  Only the client can make decisions on what access points it connects to.  We can only try to influence it.

how would one influence it?

We are already influencing it by reducing the power.  You can turn it off, then turn it back on again, and it might select the closest access point, as a result.

So it turns out these cameras having the issue can only do 2.4ghz, not 5ghz, and the mesh AP closest to it is likely using the 2.4ghz radios to backhaul the traffic and using the 5ghz radios as the access radios. Is there a way to invert those to see if that helps?

This is an ap125, by the way...

By default backhaul is performed on the 5ghz band.  I would open a TAC case to get the details of your deployment reveiwed carefully and remediated.

Is that HPE now? or is there still aruba support?

HPE.  Please see the page here:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/support-services/contact-support/

Only way to force cameras/clients to a specific AP is to have specific SSIDs created on each AP specific to each camera. Not sure that is a good direction to go, but it would force the issue.