Wireless Access

 

Does this problem sound familiar to anyone?

 

We have seen an increase in the number of times we have to reboot an AP because the users who most frequently use the AP (one 205H per dorm room) are experiencing very poor performance.  They only experience poor performance in their room... they are fine everywhere else on campus... usually most other people who visit their room, including our help desk staff, do not have problems in that room on that AP, but sometimes the AP is slow for everyone.

 

Rebooting the AP (via PoE power cycle just to be sure) seems to resolve the issue.

 

This issue will start to appear more and more frequently the longer it has been since the last controller reboot, and occurances also seem to have increased since we upgraded to 6.5.x.

 

We cannot seem to get this problem to replicate in the lab, so it has been very hard to come up with something solid to file a TAC ticket on.  I'm just wondering whether anyone else has noticed this.

 

I have had an issue like this before where we found out the DHCP just randomly stopped working for certain APs. It turned out to be a bug.

I would run a user-debug for the users in question and see if anything stands out.

It also wouldn’t hurt just to open a ticket with TAC. There’s been plenty of times where I basically go ‘it broke’ and we are able to figure out what to look for.

This also sounds like maybe a bad roaming issue? Are they connected to the same AP before and after you reboot it?

And by bad roam I was more thinking the lack of roaming or sticky clients. Have you’ve looked at the RF in that area? High utilization? Retries?

 

The clients seem to get poor performance only when associated to the AP in question.  Many reports say they can literally step outside their room into the hallway (thus probably changing to a nearby AP) and notice an immediate improvement.

 

They do keep associating to that AP, and the problem persists whether or not they are getting klcked around for sticky client or band-steering.

 

I don't think it is an RF issue as, like I said, we have had our helpdesk go down there, associate to the AP, and everything works dandy for them, and in well over half the cases users also say visitors to their room do not have the same issues they do.  Also it's not an AppleTVish issue, since it is a mix of both Windows, Android, and Apple products all affected at the same time.  It happens regardless of channel and most of the hosts here are on 11ac with a 40MHz layout, so the spectrum is pretty well distributed.

 

I've not noticed anything particularly special about the RF performance charts. I did have one do this in an area where it affected a whole block of four rooms, and the only way I could tell which AP to reboot  was by finding the one with the abberently low traffic levels.  I guess something about the architecture there makes that AP particularly loud across the hall.

 

It's as if familiarity breeds contempt... either the AP or the client seem to decide they are sick of each other, and start dragging their feet on transmitting packets.

 

A good start would be to get the tech support of the AP.  When you catch the behavior, if someone is able, they should do a minute pcap on the channel of the AP And client and capture the tech-support and submit it to TAC.

 

It might not be an RF issue, but a pcap and tech support right after would give TAC/Engineering something to look at.

 

Yeah I've already got a before/after reboot on one case and do intend to eventually file a TAC ticket.  I need a customer who is solid enough  that I trust what they are telling me, though... it's hard enough to get them to answer the "hey we rebooted your AP is it OK now?" email.  Seriously, in most cases we only assume we fixed it because they stop complaining.

 

Really here in this thread I am trying to see if this is something other customers have noticed.  I'm well aware of TACs needs and capabilities.

 

 

We have seen many problems go on for months because customers fail to open cases.  They suffer in silence or complain here and no progress is made.  There is plenty of room for other customers here to chime in to possibly solve problems, but there are many issues that have NOT been observed in the wild that we can help with.  Opening a TAC case allows us to rule out quite a few things that it is NOT, so we can save time upfront and steer you in the right direction.  There are also customers that are not here, and we have observed similar behavior that we can match to yours.  You will never hear from those people.  As soon as you open a case, we can compare with other behaviors in the wild or even in the lab that we might have seen to bring this to a conclusion.

 

You as the customer have every right to NOT open a TAC case, but if you can leverage a service that you have already paid for to solve a problem, why wouldn't you?

 

 

 

Frankly I am kind of sick of you coming along and telling me to open a TAC case every time I post asking other users whether they have seen a problem.  It doesn't help me in the least.

 

Finding out if something is a known issue in discussion forums is part of my normal preparatory work for filing a TAC case.  I've filed many, a few of which went so far as to require working closely with engineering to install custom built debug images, one of which found a chipset level bug.  By doing my homework ahead of time, I make the best use of my time, and also that of the TAC's.

 

This used to be such a rare issue it was not worth bothering with.  It is now on my list of things to get resolved due to an increased frequency... but it is still a rather rare issue.  I have many others to be working on on different parts of the network.  When I am ready, I will file a TAC case.

 

 

Got it.  Good luck.

To summarize Colin's three posts to you, he said (summarizing)

 

"While this is rare, please open a TAC case with your logs, while the occurrence is rare, TAC may have other insights, and it may help other customers. However, it's your RIGHT now to open a TAC case if you don't want to."

 

First, he gave you multiple reasons why to open a TAC case, both for YOUR benefit as well as others, that customers often suffer in silence and shouldn't have to, and that if all else fails if you don't want to, you don't have to. And yet you come back with "I'm sick you telling me to open a TAC case every time I make a post...", in fact, he didn't TELL you to, he suggested it would be beneficial to all if you did, but you didn't have to.

 

Secondly, something worth noting. As a 10+ year employee with Aruba and the 7+ years that Airheads/Community has been around in some form, there is no mandate for any employees to help, answer questions, or monitor these boards. Colin, myself, and many other employees do this purely on a volunteer basis. And while we *very* much appreciate your questions, posts, and help you've offered others here on these boards, we sincerely do, it's counter productive to insult those offering help, and to mischaracterize their responses to you in such a condescending matter. We Aruba employees, partners, and customers are here, just like you, to help run down issues, answer questions, and build the community to be better, and PART of that is when we see things that are rare, but MAY be occurring in other customer environments, that us telling you to open a TAC case isn't to be a burden to you, or to punt the question to TAC. We say that because a) TAC may have other correlary cases similar to yours, and your logs may have run down root cause, and b) there may already be a fix/workaround, or maybe you're the first. And TAC has additional log and engineering tools and know better than anyone generally where to look on specific issues, even if it's not readily apparent to us here.

 

Finally...

 

bjulin Total Messages Posted 281

jhoward Total messages posted 1,530

cjoseph Total Messages Posted 22,212

 

I wish you luck on finding resolution to your issue, and if you do find root cause, on your own or via support here or TAC, and if you do, please feel free to post it back here. 

 

I apologize if my feedback, intended to help cjoseph focus his efforts where they will do more good, was curt to the point of causing anyone any upset.  I honestly do not find multiple replies saying "open a TAC case" useful, neither in my threads, nor when I am looking at a thread for soulutions.  After the first one, they are just clutter.  So I say so.  Frankly.  It is not intended as an insult, just honestly expressing my thoughts on the matter.