I am trying to setup a simple bridge setup between 2 Cisco 1532e access points. The root side is connected to an HP 5406 zl switch and the mesh side is connected to an HPE Aruba 2530 POE. I have a basic switched network with a single core switch performing intervlan routing. I tested this setup extensively and it took a long time to get it to work semi-reliably. After weeks going back and forth with Cisco, i was able to get the bridge to stay up for a week without issue. I decided to deploy them and they worked for about 2 months. The remote (map) bldg had to have the power cut for some work, and the bridge would never come back up correctly. Both the RAP and MAP would pair to another bridge root AP in the area, even though i had them set to use their own bridge group. The RAP access point would take a very long time to come up. And once it came up, pings would be sporadic for around 10 minutes. The root switch port would appear up on the switch, it would see the mac of the access point, and there would be an entry in the arp table for the DHCP reservation I added for the access point on the core switch but tests wouldn't detect traffic for long periods of time. I tried using different switches/ports (all HP), upgrading switch operating systems, and cabling. Cisco TAC RMA'd 4 out of the 5 access points i ordered and they still did the same thing. Is there some issue with Cisco 1532e access points and HP switches? I have 75 other access points (some in bridged mode as well) and they all work normally with HP switches. Cisco TAC even went so far as to suggest trying replacing the HP switches with Cisco switches.
I have a 5508 wlc running version 8.0.140.0 in H/A mode. All 4 ports of the controllers are in LAG mode.
I don't understand why it would work consistently for 2 months, then all of a sudden, they won't bridge. After the outage, I was able to briefly get the AP's to bridge after removing the bridge-group name and rebooting the switch on the MAP side, then re-adding the bridge-group name. It worked for around 24 hours, but they crashed again and the link went down. I have had to put the old equipment back in.
