Redundancy and load balancing in Cisco 350 Access points

[s.kadagathur]

Hello,

We have deployed two or three access points in close proximity with non interference channels thinking that it will provide redundancy in case one of the access points goes offline(not operational). As a proof to this recently one of our access points became inoperational but to my surprise the users who were connected to this access point continue do so without having wireless connectivity. Actually for some reason the ethernet side of the access point failed. The redundancy did not work as it supposed to be. Actually I had to connect to this failed access point through the web browser interface(since the radio is still working) and configure the access point with a different IP address. Then the users could go to the other functional access point. I wonder if any one has similar experience and would appreciate the response. Also we are using Cisco Aironet wireless client cards. Thanks.

[tbarberj]

Of course you would expect me to say this because I work for Symbol ;-)

but if you had Symbol Technologies AP4131 802.11b Access Points installed you could have enabled the "Ethernet connection lost" feature which will cause all 802.11b clients to disassociate with that access point and find another if the Ethernet connection is lost for a user-definable period of time.

Tom Barber

Symbol Technologies

[brucea]

Aironet had this feature for many years, but there is a bug in the firmware for the AP350 and AP340. It is being addressed at the present time and will be released in the next 60 days, along with many new features. It does not simply drop associations. but rather, if the Ethernet connection is lost, the AP turns into a repeater. If the client is in range of another AP, it will hand off to the other wired AP (because a wireless AP has better performance than a repeater in terms of throughput). If the AP that is now a repeater, can hear another AP that is wired, it will continue to pass any traffic for clients still attached. If it cannot hear any wired AP, it will not permit any clients to stay associated, forcing them to look for another AP.

Bruce Alexander

[s.kadagathur]

Thanks for the information. But in our case it looks like it didn't behave like a repeater because there was another wired access point in the close proximity about 30 feet with non interference channel. I have set up the repeater access point here and it works fine in other circumstance where in one want to extend the wireless coverage by deploying repeater access points. Another interesting thing to note is when I use Lucent Gold(Orinoco) card I got the association with the working access point where as Cisco aironet client contiune to associate with failed access point. Also I have tested the repeater access point with Cisco aironet and Lucent wireless cards. Please note that when the repeater access point's signal is strong a lucent card would associate with it but the Cisco aironet card would continue associate with the primary access point although the signal is very weak.