Permanant Connection for WLAN

[Ed Willson]

I have many machines that need to establish a connection to a particular WLAN. The operators of the machines have no access to a keyboard, so they can't re-authernicate. If I turn off the "Enable Session Timeout" for a particular WLAN will that allow the machines to stay connected indefinitely, and across reboots? The controllers are XP or Embedded XP. I cached the credentials for the connection on the controllers.

Thanks,

    Ed

[Scott Fella]

That is something you can try. The issue is if the device goes to sleep or when in sleep mode the device doesn't respond back to the AP. The WLC will eventually remove the client.

Your device should automatically reconnect though.

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[Ed Willson]

Scott,

    Thanks for the reply. I did remove the timeout for the wlan. We'll know Monday early morning if it works. The only down time is a few hours late Sunday night. The machines in question are from http://burnykaliburn.com/ .Pretty typical CNC 2d machine.

Thanks,

     Ed

[Edgar Khachatrian]

Ed,

Where is your DHCP server....?

If it is the a Cisco router than

do this ...

conf t

ip dhcp pool (pool name)

lease infinite.

Ed

[Scott Fella]

You might also want to enable passive client on the WLAN advanced tab if you still have issues. If these have static address.

Q. How is the passive client feature used on Wireless LAN Controllers?

A. Passive clients are wireless devices, such as scales and printers that are configured with a static IP address. These clients do not transmit any IP information such as IP address, subnet mask, and gateway information when they associate with an access point. As a result, when passive clients are used, the controller never knows the IP address unless they use the DHCP.

WLCs currently act as a proxy for ARP requests. Upon receiving an ARP request, the controller responds with an ARP response instead of passing the request directly to the client. This scenario has two advantages:

The upstream device that sends out the ARP request to the client will not know where the client is located.

Power for battery-operated devices such as mobile phones and printers is preserved because they do not have to respond to every ARP requests.

Since the wireless controller does not have any IP related information about the passive clients, it cannot respond to any ARP requests. The current behavior does not allow the transfer of ARP requests to passive clients. Any application that tries to access a passive client will fail.

The passive client feature enables the ARP requests and responses to be exchanged between wired and wireless clients. This feature, when enabled, allows the controller to pass ARP requests from wired to wireless clients until the desired wireless client gets to the RUN state.

For information on how to configure the passive client feature, read the section on Using the GUI to Configure Passive Client in Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Configuration Guide, Release 7.0.116.0.

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