I installed two Cisco Business WAP371-A-K9 APS at a local fire department. The APs are both connected to POE injectors and connected to a regular home cisco router and the router is connected to a surfboard modum with Timewarner. They worked great for almost a year, but all a sudden stopped letting clients connect. When a client would try to connect to wireless, it would give a failed authentication error and not connect. I would unplug the LAN cable from the POE injector and let the closest AP reboot. Once rebooted, then clients would connect, but it would stop working after a day or two.
I found the APs were pulling their own IP addresses from DHCP and I assigned static addresses to both APs and it seem to resolve the issue without authentication errors. A few days later the clients stopped connecting again and would give a failed to assign IP Address message. If I rebooted the APs, then it would start assigning dhcp addresses again. The department has a Windows server setup that has Active Directory and DHCP setup on it. After some digging I found the Cisco router had DHCP enabled on it also. I disabled DHCP on the cisco router, but it didn't help, so I disabled DHCP on the server and enabled it on the cisco router. That seem to resolve the issue, but a few days later it started again.
We plan on removing the old Windows sever and moving to office 365 and Azure, so I'm not wanting to put to much time in messing with it. Seems like it's a dhcp issue, but cannot figure out why it just stops working after months of being fine. May be a firmware issue, but haven't tried rolling back yet. I checked and the Cisco Router has 200 dhcp addresses to hand out and shows only a few clients connected in the dhcp table and the lease last for 48 hours. Any ideas on what may be happening? I'm going over today and try capturing some packets with wireshark and see if I can find any clues. I'm hoping to get rid of the server, replace the Cisco router with something better and move to Azure in about a month, but worried the issues with the AP will still exist. I turned debugging in in the APS and hoping it will give some info. Any info anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated.
