Wireless Access

Hi,

I'm trying to set up a POC outdoor point to point using AP-175 and 3400 mobility controller. I'm currently staging the set up in the lab where the APs are connected via LAN cables directly to the controller. One AP-175 is connected to LAN port 1 and the other controller is connected to LAN port 2. I'm using the document "AP_OutdoorPointToPoint.pdf" to set up. However I'm encountering the issue where when i provision an AP as mesh point, the AP reboots but does not appear in the provision page. The status of that AP remains as "unprovisioned access points". I have no issues provisioning one AP as mesh portal. It comes up fine after reboot. I followed the instructructions and am a lost as to what else is missing. I provisioned the mesh portal first (which is successful) then provision the mesh point (which fails). I have to do a factory_reset on the AP provisioned as mesh point to be able to see it in the AP installation page again. control plane security is turned off.

How do I verify the mesh point-to-point is properly set up ? Thanks!

Attached is the show tech support

Attachment(s)

tech-support.txt   271 KB 1 version

mesh-point-console-output.txt   4 KB 1 version

An outdoor AP-175 access point will appear as unprovisioned if you do not put the antenna gain in when provisioning.  Did you put in the gain?

I did put in the gain as 5dbi under 5ghz and 0 under 2.4ghz as I don't have a 2.4 ghz antenna, as I'm using the AP-Ant-91. I only have one AP-Ant-91 for each AP and connected them to antenna port 4. will this set up work ?

kk1976,

You have to disconnect the mesh point.

In ArubaOS, after mesh points are provisioned they will no longer connect to a controller or portal over the same L2 network.  This is normal behavior.

The last line in your mesh point output appears to confirm that the unit is provisioned and ready to accept a mesh uplink:

# vap aruba001 vlan is 0. fwd-mode:0 mesh

The VAP is telling you there is a virtual AP, on the private (mesh) VLAN of 0, set to mesh forwarding mode.

Hi,

If that is the case, could it be that the antenna set-up is wrong and the 2 APs are not communicating via wireless ? I'm using an AP-ANT-91 for each AP. Its only a single connector but the AP-175 have 2 connectors for 5 Ghz.

The P/S LED on the mesh point continues to blink

That sounds like the same issue that I ran into. I had HT (high throughput) enabled in the mesh radio profile and I could not make a connection with a single antenna. Once I disabled HT it worked fine. Ultimately I got the proper antenna (dual-element antenna with 2 connectors) and I was able to enable HT.

Robert

You must have 2 antennas.

In addition, they should be dual-polarization.

Rotating a spare ANT-91 would work at very short range, but this would not be valid more than 3-5 meters away.  Because the pattern of the ANT-91 is much wider horizontally than vertically.

We sell a range of dual-polarization antennas that have 2 elements in the same radome.   (e.g. you do not pay more for the second element).

Thanks all. After going through with aruba support, we managed to provision the mesh point after upgrading the OS of the controller to 6.1.3.5. No other changes were made other than having to povision via command line. After that we had significant packet losses when pinging from controller to the mesh point IP. This was eventually resolved by disabling the HT radio. I believe this is related to the ANT-91 issues you mentioned.

Due to this being a POC and we do not have any other antennas on hand, can the ANT-91 set up be used to measure bandwidth performance over approx 200 meters ? Our customers are eventually going to purchase and deploy ANT-2x2-5614. if not, can we do a bandwidth test over shorter distances and assume that is the likely performance with the longer distance and more suitable antenna ?