SSID Creation issues

[Daniel Anderson]

Hi,

Over the weekend I upgraded a No. of 4402 Wireless LAN controllers to Code 7.0.220.0, the upgrade went smoothly with all Access Points migrating over, the existing SSIDs that were in place prior to the upgrade are functioning as expected today.

However, this morning, I've created a new SSID and set to Broadcast out on all our LAN Controllers, but I'm unable to see the network as expected. I've browsed for the network from a No. of different laptops and smartphones, and none are able to see the new SSID advertised. I've connected to the CLI of the devices in question, and running 'show wlan summary', shows the newly created SSID and confirms that it's in the enable state.

Is there something blatant I've missed with regards creating an SSID on this code version, we were previously on an old Version 4 code, and never had any issues on this firmware when creating SSIDs.

Any help/input much appreciated

TIA

Dan

[Scott Fella]

Take a look at the AP Groups setting. You might have that configured and you will need to add the SSID to the specific AP Group.

[Daniel Anderson]

Thanks Scott.

The new SSID will actually be used as a Guest network, so we simply need it to connect to the management interface, which I believe will be part of the Default Group. I've checked the Default Group, and can see the newly created SSID within this group, along with the other guest networks which are currently functioning as expected.

[Scott Fella]

Okay, so the new SSID is working?

[Daniel Anderson]

No, unfortunately it's still not functioning.

Looking at the configuration it appears that it should be, but, I'm still not seeing it broadcast.

[Scott Fella]

Can you post a screen shot of that wlan ssid?  How many SSID's total do you have?

[Daniel Anderson]

We have 4 other SSIDs, a mixture of corporate SSIDs and some Guest networks. I've added a link which shows the show wlan information for the new SSID. I've compared this to an existing network, and all appears to be the same across both.

It's almost as though the WLC has accepted the configuration, but has failed to push the configuration to the Access Points. Does this seem a valid point?

Re: the Groups question - Yes, we have 3 additional created for use on our corporate network, we have a group per floor which relate back to the relevant interface. For our Guest networks, these are configured with the management interface/default group.

[Scott Fella]

Doesn't seem right. If you check broadcast enable on the WLAN SSID, you should see it. Try to remove the SSID and create it again. By the way, you using this SSID for guest? Do you have a guest anchor?

Thanks,

Scott Fella

Sent from my iPhone

[blakekrone]

If you are using AP Groups and you have your SSID only configured in the "default group" then it will not be broadcasted on any of the APs that are members of other groups. You have to implicitely go into each group and setup the mapping for the WLAN, even if it is going out the management interface. Can you provide screen shots of your AP group setup?

[Scott Fella]

Do you have any ap groups configured besideds the default-group?

[Scott Fella]

Your SSID configurations is okay, but if you have this as part of your default-group, then you need to make sure the ap's are in that group also, or else you will not see it. 

[Daniel Anderson]

I've just been reading about that feature, it appears there are some changes to the AP groups feature as part of the upgrade.

What I'm trying to understand, is how the Default-Group works. Currently we have all our APs in 1 of 3 groups dependant on which floor of the building they're configured in, so when a client connects on the Grnd floor, they're given an address from Subnet Flr 1.

Are APs able to be a member of multiple groups, as we require all SSIDs to be advertised out of all Access Points within the building, whilst allowing for the existing groups feature for out corporate SSID.

[Scott Fella · Accepted solution]

Okay... so yes that is where you have the issue.  With AP Groups, you assign an AP to that group and then you can specifiy what SSID's you want on that AP and also what interface you want that SSID to be mapped to.  The default-group will have all SSID's and whatever interface you have set in the WLAN SSID.

AP's are not able to be a member of more than one group.

[blakekrone]

I was going to ask what version you upgraded from, there were a lot of changes with this!

APs can only be a member of a single group, AP groups now also control the "WLAN Override" feature of the past. So anytime you place an AP in an AP Group you need to also go in and setup all WLANs that need to be present on those APs. So each AP Group will always typically have your guest network going out management then an anchor, your internal networks will be mapped accordingly for interface mappings. The key is that you need to implicetely set up all the WLANs for each AP Group.

[Daniel Anderson]

Bingo. Thankyou Scott.

Looking at the 3 AP Groups we currently have configured, only the existing SSIDs (that were in place, pre-upgrade) exist within each of these groups, the SSID I created this morning does not. I'll add this now, and in theory I should start seeing the SSID broadcast!

I've not mentioned the code version we were running, partly due to the age of it, suffice to say it was an early release within Version 4.