Wireless Access

Hello,

 

What is the most assured way to tell the difference between an AP that is bootstrapping vs an AP that is rebooting?

 

TIA,

 

--Raf

"Show ap debug counters" will tell you.  

 

"show log system all" will also tell you who is bootstrapping or rebooting.

 

 

show ap debug system-status ap-name <ap-name>

What is the difference between these two from a conceptual point of view? 

 

Is it:

 

Rebooting: happens for external reason

 

Bootstrapping: happens when told to manually?

 

I'm just confused because rebooting is technically short for "reboostrapping" considering that's where "boot" came from.

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@jlittlefield wrote:

What is the difference between these two from a conceptual point of view? 

 

Is it:

 

Rebooting: happens for external reason

 

Bootstrapping: happens when told to manually?

 

I'm just confused because rebooting is technically short for "reboostrapping" considering that's where "boot" came from.

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An access point, when it has contacted a controller will send heartbeats, typically one per second.  Each access point has a bootstrap threshold where if it misses 8 heartbeats it will rebootstrap.

 

During a Rebootstrap:

 

- The AP turns of its radios except those with bridge mode SSIDs
- It tries to establish communication with the current LMS using PAPI
- If unable to contact the current LMS (lms-ip) and there is a backup LMS, it will try to establish communication with the bkup-lms-ip as configured in the AP system-profile
If the AP is unable to contact an LMS, it will then initiate a full reboot

So what is the fix here? I have been seeing this with one of the APs

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@harishdv wrote:

So what is the fix here? I have been seeing this with one of the APs

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Please provide more information about your situation, or start a new thread.  It is not possible to tell if you even have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Here is the log. We monitor all APs thru Airwave and its been alerting for this one AP. As you see, AP itself is reachable. Let me know if you need more details.

 

Dec 25 18:36:52 :311004: <WARN> |AP US-CA01-02-05-AP0225-ABA03@172.22.223.195 sapd| Missed 8 heartbeats; rebootstrapping
Dec 25 20:26:55 :311004: <WARN> |AP US-CA01-02-05-AP0225-ABA03@172.22.223.195 sapd| Missed 8 heartbeats; rebootstrapping
Dec 25 21:53:58 :311004: <WARN> |AP US-CA01-02-05-AP0225-ABA03@172.22.223.195 sapd| Missed 8 heartbeats; rebootstrapping
Dec 26 13:57:04 :311004: <WARN> |AP US-RAP205H-04@172.22.13.24 sapd| Missed 30 heartbeats; rebootstrapping

(US-CA01-CON7220-LOCAL) #ping 172.22.223.195
Press 'q' to abort.
Sending 5, 92-byte ICMP Echos to 172.22.223.195, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 0.653/0.6844/0.744 ms

You should type "show ap debug counters" to see how widespread the problem is. If the problem is with all aps, I would check to make sure that the uplink to the controller is big enough. The unwritten rule is that you need 1 gigabit connect room for every 100 APs that connects to to a controller. If it is happening to only one access point, I would check to make sure that the AP negotiated the proper speed and duplex on its switch port and that there is no congestion upstream of that AP.

What am I looking for in the debug counters to identify if there is an
issue? Controller has multiples gig uplinks and there are less than 100 APs
on this controller, so congestion is not an issue.

thanks

You would be looking at whether it is happening globally or to a single AP. It is only a concern if it is happening all the time. Bootstrapping will occur if there is a momentary interruption in communication between the AP and controller. If it happens infrequently, it can be ignored if the loss in connectivity can be explained in your infrastructure. I would open a TAC case if you want it analyzed, because the variables are too numerous to run through just by guessing here.

Nevermind, found the cause; it was a duplicate IP.