Cisco 1832i Mobility Express - Client Internet Issues

[talan.westby]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone could guide me on this. I've got a 1832i in my home office running 8.10.130.0 in Mobility Express and I can get clients connecting to it fine. What I'm finding is I'm getting some weird intermittent connectivity from my clients to the wired network. The setup is:

Router ---- Switch ---- AP ---- Client.

These devices are on a single subnet 192.168.90.0/24 and DHCP is provided from the router. The clients get an IP Address fine however, when testing the client will lose connectivity to anything beyond the "controller" and connectivity ceases to function. The router and the AP provide wireless to two different areas but on the same SSID. I've tried changing SSIDs on the 1832i to no avail. The controller IP is 192.168.90.245 and the AP is getting its IP Address via DHCP through the management interface of the controller so I know there aren't any networking issues. I can also confirm that if I roam to the wireless connection at the router all devices work seamlessly.

I've turned off all RF optimisations to make sure there wasn't anything untoward with channel changing or anything like that but as it stands I cannot see what else may be causing it. Any advise would be appreciated.

[balaji.bandi]

start with config analyzer first :

https://developer.cisco.com/docs/wireless-troubleshooting-tools/#!wireless-troubleshooting-tools

how about other buildings that AP ? how many sub-ordinate AP  in the network connecting the ME?

what is the switch model ? How is the switch config looks like ?

how about when you try to connect from Lan to Wireless clients ?

[talan.westby]

I don't have any other ME APs just this single one operating as a master controller and AP. The switch is a netgear prosafe and is completely flat in terms of configuration. This is a super small set up as its a home office. When trying from LAN to wireless clients I get the same I can't get any further than the controller. The weird thing is the clients work for anywhere between 10 seconds and a couple of minutes then they cannot communicate past the controller. This AP only needs to provide wireless connectivity into the internal LAN nothing else, no dhcp, no clever stuff at all. To be honest it's a bit overkill but what I had spare going from a wireless refresh I did so made sense to use it.

[Rich R]

If you reload the AP does it fix the problem?

Start by updating to 8.10.185.0.
8.10.130.0 is very old and a lot of bugs have been fixed since then.
If upgrade fails (sometimes runs out of flash space) then you might need to load a capwap image on it first then convert back to ME with the new version.

[talan.westby]

No, it doesn’t unfortunately. The issue remains regardless of when the AP is rebooted.

I'll try and get a hold of the new software. Unfortunately, I'm unsure if I'll be able to since my work moved away from Cisco to another provider a few months ago. I know we had an agreement but I'm unsure if it has expired.

[Leo Laohoo]

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@talan.westby wrote:
The clients get an IP Address fine however, when testing the client will lose connectivity to anything beyond the "controller" and connectivity ceases to function. 

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May I ask if you are able to elaborate or expand further? 

What I want to know is the wireless client connects to the WiFi (WiFi symbol remains on) but no traffic, sporadic traffic?

[talan.westby]

Hi Leo,

Sure, the client remains connected throughout the tests and running ICMP tests to the controller works fine however, moving beyond that to any other device either on the switch or the gateway I get no response. If I then try ICMP from another device on the network e.g. connected via the switch then ICMP is fine. I upgraded the AP over the weekend as recommended by Rich and have been out of the office since that upgrade so I'll play with it some more today now the upgrade has been completed and see how we go. What's quite odd about this weird issue is, for example, we use Microsoft Authenticator at work and my phone gets the client notification however, when I choose to accept the passwordless attempt the return traffic does not go until I drop off the wifi and onto 4G. I've not bad this before with any other AP I'm hoping it's a bug in this software as I had something similar with these 1832s when I installed them at work and upgrading to 8.10.130.

[Rich R]

If it was a bug on 1832 then I'd expect a reload to fix it so the problem may be elsewhere.

The software is at https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286288035/type/286289839/release/8.10.185.0

[talan.westby]

Hi All,

Unfortunately, the upgrade appears to not have resolved this issue. Whilst connected on my laptop it switches from wired to wireless constantly due to the identical routing metrics I've got applied. When it switches to wireless I lose my audio Teams calls and then when it switches back to wired the call is re-established. Whilst using my phone, if it's connected to the wifi as mentioned previously I receive the notification for passwordless login however, on accepting the notification the data isn't forwarded onto the network, moving back to 4G allows the traffic to be sent to Azure.

[Leo Laohoo]

MS Teams?

The main issue is about people using MS Teams?  And when I say "people", I mean 10 or more associated to the same AP and MS Teams just goes belly up?

[talan.westby]

Hi Leo,

No, it's just me, as I mentioned previously this is my home office so it's just me on my laptop. It would appear to be something to do with inbound traffic only from the Wireless clients to the AP, on both devices I'm testing on, I'm getting notifications for example a call request on Teams and my passwordless notification on my phone but when I attempt to initiate anything back I get no response. It's very odd. I've been messing around with the router this morning changing some DHCP mappings to see if there was any conflicting IP Addresses and I'm planning on statically assigning the AP IP Address as well as the Mobility Controller in a minute to see if that helps. 

[Rich R]

That was supposed to be fixed ... "high channel utilization and client lags with 9 or more clients using MS TEAMS"
https://bst.cloudapps.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCwa31596

[talan.westby]

Ok, so after a lot of trial and error, I think I may have gotten to the bottom of the issue. This issue seems to have been twofold.

1. Despite my home office being 50+ meters away from where the router is providing the other WiFi Access point, it would have appeared that they were conflicting and my two devices were roaming between them. Changing the transmit power down to the lowest and also changing the density mode to high so only 54Mbps and above was advertised brought the packet loss down significantly. 

2. The other issue I found which was a weird one is that the switch where the AP connected seemed to have no storm control enabled. After bringing the AP back online I noticed that the same number of packets being dropped on WiFi was being dropped on Wired too. I ended up putting on a storm control rate limit on the switch (Netgear) and the two changes combined seemed to have fixed the problem.