Wireless Water Cooler

Airpeople,

I am using RAP3s at a couple of thousand locations.  I am not using WiFi on them at all, only the wired ports.  I want to understand how they react to poor or absent connectivity to their primary lms.  Aside from that, are there any circumstances where a RAP could be up and pingable on it's local pool address, but they clients themselves cannot communicate for an extended perion of time.  In my situation, the tunnel for the wired port clients is layer 2 all the way to the controller green zone subnet. (default gateway outside of controller).  We had a situation where multiple clients in the same geographic area were unable to obtain an IP address, yet the RAP remained up (pingable from the controller).

I'm told everything I need to know is in the system profile, so here it is:

AP system profile "HBA-TPA-sysprof"
-----------------------------------
Parameter Value
--------- -----
RF Band g
RF Band for AM mode scanning all
Native VLAN ID 1
Tunnel Heartbeat Interval 1
Session ACL ap-uplink-acl
Corporate DNS Domain N/A
SNMP sysContact N/A
LED operating mode (11n/11ac APs only) normal
LED override Disabled
Driver log level warnings
Console log level emergencies
SAP MTU N/A
RAP MTU 1200 bytes
LMS IP 192.76.82.76
Backup LMS IP 137.188.108.63
LMS IPv6 N/A
Backup LMS IPv6 N/A
LMS Preemption Enabled
LMS Hold-down Period 600 sec
LMS ping interval 20
Remote-AP DHCP Server VLAN N/A
Remote-AP DHCP Server Id 192.168.11.1
Remote-AP DHCP Default Router 192.168.11.1
Remote-AP DHCP DNS Server N/A
Remote-AP DHCP Pool Start 192.168.11.2
Remote-AP DHCP Pool End 192.168.11.254
Remote-AP DHCP Pool Netmask 255.255.255.0
Remote-AP DHCP Lease Time 0 days
Remote-AP uplink total bandwidth 0 kbps
Remote-AP bw reservation 1 N/A
Remote-AP bw reservation 2 N/A
Remote-AP bw reservation 3 N/A
Remote-AP Local Network Access Disabled
Flex Radio Mode 2.4GHz-and-5GHz
IPM activation Disabled
IPM power reduction steps with priorities N/A
Bootstrap threshold 8
Double Encrypt Disabled
Dump Server N/A
Heartbeat DSCP 0
Management DSCP N/A
IP DSCP to VLAN 802.1p priority mapping N/A
Maintenance Mode Disabled
Maximum Request Retries 10
Request Retry Interval 10 sec
Number of IPSEC retries 85
Secondary Master IP/FQDN N/A
AeroScout RTLS Server N/A
RTLS Server configuration N/A
RTLS Server Compatibility Mode Enabled
Slow Timer Recovery by rebooting itself Enabled
Telnet Disabled
Disable RAP Tftp Image Upgrade Disabled
Spanning Tree Disabled
AP multicast aggregation Disabled
AP ARP attack protection Disabled
AP multicast aggregation allowed VLANs none
Console enable Enabled
AP Console Protection Enabled
AP Console Password ********
Password for Backup ********
AP USB Power override Disabled
RF Band for Backup all
Operation for Backup off
BLE Endpoint URL N/A
BLE Auth Token N/A
BLE Operation Mode Disabled
Health Check Disabled
Health Check Parameter mode ping packet-size 32 burst-size 5 report 60 frequency 10 retries 3
Radio and Nbr Stats Report Period 30 minutes
Radio and Nbr Measurement Duration 5 minutes
Radio and Nbr Stats Report Enabled Disabled

I would expect that if the RAP loses heartbeats, it would stop servicing client traffic. For WLAN, the SSID (depending on the setting: Always/Backup/Normal) will disappear or come up. For the wired, I'm not really sure. Fact of life is that if the controller is unreachable, the wireless frames will not traverse to the controller (and vice versa). In case the RAP cannot reach the controller for a longer time, it will restart in the hope that it will be better after that.

Probably the best is to work with Aruba TAC (via your partner) as they can go deeper into your specific situation. Some of the retry and interval parameters can be changed to possible better match your environment, but I would not change unless advised by Aruba TAC.