Here's the deal:
I'm working as a co-op for a company and my supervisor asked me to try to work out a bug they've been having with a couple access points. I've exhausted just about all my efforts and can't come up with anything as to why there's issues so here I am. I'm a 2nd year IT major w/ a primary focus of networking so hopefully I'll learn a thing or two! (and go easy on me )
Background:
We have 3 buildings all in a line down the street. No building's WiFi signal is within range if you are in a different building. Basically, you can't be in building #1 and catch a signal from building #2, or any combination of the 3. We have 5 AP's between the 3 buildings all of which are Cisco WAP4410N's. To paint a picture, there are 3 AP's in building #1 (channels 1, 6, 11), 1 in building #2 (channel 1), and 1 in building #3 (channel 1). All AP's have the same SSID, security settings (WPA2), and are on the same VLAN (although I'm not very familiar with VLAN's). They all have the same shared key and key-renewal time. I've upgraded the firmware on the problem AP's to no avail.
Problem:
The problem is that most phones (iOS and Android) and laptops cannot roam between all 5 access points, only the 3 within building #1. I work in building #1 and I can connect to, and roam between, each AP without a problem. When I walk over to building #2, my phone should connect automatically but I cannot connect at all, same for building #3. The phone sees the network but always hangs up at either "Authenticating.." or "Obtaining IP Address.." However, a few times I have connected in building #2 (due to a combination of firmware upgrade, reboots, and "forgetting" the network on my phone and readding it), and when I walked back to building #1 I connected right away (as it should). Considering you're connected at building #2 (which I can't seem to do), it seems like roaming from building #2 to #1 is not a problem, but going from #1 to #2 is. Whenever I go out of range of building #1 I connect instintaneously as soon as I am back in range; This is not the case for the other 2 buildings because I cannot connect in the first place. It seems like something that has to do with the 3 AP's in building #1 is keeping me from connecting in building #2 or #3. Some people who work in building #2 and #3 have no problem connecting to the AP there, but I'm not sure if they can roam to building #1 successfully.
This is a weird problem and sort of hard to describe but hopefully you can understand the problem I'm having from what I provided. It's likely the community will need more detailed info so just let me know and I will present it.
