Wireless Access

We have a multi-site network and we have a Mobility Master at our HQ office and local Controllers at each Remote Office.

1 of our smaller sites have 2 x 7005 Controllers with a handful of AP-325 in Campus mode.  Other sites have AP-325 or AP-345 with 7010 local controllers or larger models. Things are working well for the most part; but, I have noticed that the samell site I have needed to restart the AP-325's from time to time.

Not all of them; but, just 1 here or there and then after the retgart command was issued from teh Mobility Master (MM>apboot ap-name <name><enter>) then the problems with that AP-325 go way.  So far I have not needed to restart any AP's at any other sites.  The problems were that users did not connect to these AP-325 and after teh retart it was fine.  My questions are:

1).  Why do these problems happen with the AP's and not with all f the AP's?  These are a few AP's but all of them have had problems at some point (only a handful are setup in this office).

       a.  All of the controlelrs and Access Points have the same firmware version.  

       b. This specific site is the only one that has 7005 controllers.

       c.  Other sites have AP-345's but also have a different controller model.  No need to retart the other AP-345's at other sites.

2).  What can I do to maitain these Access Points so we do not have any problems?

      a.  Perhaps plan a maintenance window to regulary restart them in a planned scheduled manner?

3).  Are there any logs I can look at and uload to support if there are any problems?  Will these logs dissapear if I retart the A.P.'s?

You should not be needing to restart the APs, but there are not enough details here to go into possible causes. 

I recommend opening a support case so that they can collect client device details and a better understanding of the problem use case in order to focus on possible causes.

EDIT:  cclemmer, thanks.

You should open a Technical Support case in parallel to this post, because there could be a few things that are wrong, or you could have a bug.  They would be able to analyze the logs and at least give you an idea what could be happening.

If there is alot of cochannel interference in the area of the access point, that might be causing poor performance or keeping clients from connecting reliably to an access point, rebooting the access point temporarily relieves the situation, and clients will connect to a better access point.  Over time, it could go back to how bad it was before.

Again, check with technical support, so that they can analyze your logs and see if you have a known bug.  In addition to that, they can look at your RF utilization at the time to determine if you have to lower the transmit power on access points, or adjust your channel width to make things better.

I've also had to do this in our environment as well with AP-325's both on 6.X code. What I found is that our environment didn't have LLDP enabled on a lot of our switches and that resulted in the APs running in power-save mode. We also noticed these issues came up shortly after AP-125's were swapped out and found that some of our workstations had specific intel NICs with older driver versions and (2+ years old) and recommended driver updates as well. The combination seemed to have made some improvements - but can't say for sure it will help with everyone. LLDP is just best practice, and Wi-Fi is a 2-way communication, so it's important to evaluate both sides when looking into possible issues/root causes.