Wireless Access

I setup 32 Chromecasts in a school building and put them as well as the teachers Chromebooks all on the same VLAN. The problem I'm having is that only 8-13 are visible from the Chrome cast tab. For the ones that aren't working, I can see them connected in the wifi controller as well as ping them from the devices that aren't able to cast to them. Has anybody else had luck getting a lot of Chromecasts to all work at once in an enterprise environment?

Are you running instant or controller-based APS?

We're running a 3600 series controller and 105/205 AP's in your typical 1AP per classroom setting with the power dialed back. When I got to work this morning, I checked a few Chromecasts that were unable to be cast to yesterday and they were working fine. All other chromecasts are currently offline though since staff haven't came in and powered there projectors on yet so the traffic on the Chromecast SSID is very light right now.

Okay.  The "autoassociate" checkbox in Airgroup will only allow devices to "see" chromecasts that are on the same AP or on a neighboring AP.  Check your Airgroup configuration to ensure that is not the case.

I see the auto-associate drop down box under the Airgroup groups, but it's empty. If I click on it, I see AP-Name, AP-Group and AP-fqln as choices. When this problem starts showing it's face, I can move around anywhere in the building and cast to any of the selectable Chromecasts in the building so it doesn't seem to be a case of only seeing Chromecasts attached to certain AP's. When testing yesterday, I was verifying that the casting device and the Chromecast that wasn't viewable were connected to the same AP, SSID, VLAN, etc.

What version of ArubaOS are you running and what model Aruba Controller do you have deployed?

Aruba 3600 series and 6.4.4.20.

You could be running into this issue:

Issue 133436 is reported as fixed in 6.5.4.0.

Issue 147369 is reported as fixed in 6.5.4.0, internally as well

If you have a Window, I would (1) backup flash (2) copy it off (3) Upgrade to the latest 6.5.x.x to see if it fixes it.  You can also open a TAC case to get more specific advice.

I might be out of luck as it appears that 6.4.4.x is the latest supported release for the 3600 series controller.

:(  Sorry for suggesting that.

So I may have this issue fixed. You mentioned the auto-associate option before. I decided to set it to AP-Group and almost instantaneously was able to see all Chromecasts that were currently on in building. Fingers crossed that this has remedied my problem!

I'll monitor things the rest of the day and see if it continues to work and then come back and update this post.

Hey, can you explain where in the config this is?  Or even show a screen shot?  

Configurations > Advanced Services > AirGroup > Services

It will be under the Auto-Associate column.

I also ended up setting it to AP-Name, which only allows users to see a couple of chromecasts in their immediate area. It has been working great ever since making that change.

I too use many Chromecasts in my elementary schools, and have seen some of them not consistently show up frm time to time.  Was just curious if others have seen this.  So what exactly did you do again?

And thanks for the replies!

I setup a WPA2-PSK SSID and all student and staff chromebooks as well as classroom chromecasts connect to it. The staff chromebooks and chromecasts are assigned a user role that allows chromecasting to function where as the student devices get a role that blocks TCP/UDP 8008,8009, and 8443 so that they can't see the Chromecasts. The better method would probably be to use dynamic vlan assignment, but I'm not setup for that quite yet. I also have all of my AirGroup services set to AP-Name under the Auto-Associate column. This makes it so that a user can only see other chromecasts that are also connected to the same or neighboring AP's in that area.

Do your students use Chromebooks as well?  Do you know you can administratvely block "casting" to students if you are managing your chromebooks in the admin control panel?

I did realize that after I had already set everything up on the network side. Once I found out I could do that, I also disabled casting for students in the admin console.