Signal Strength & Quality

[iainporter]

Hi Guys, I have an issue in a High School with some clients having issues authenticating using LEAP to AP1100 802.11g, I am pretty sure its the build of the client but I am unsure about the signal strenght & quality, most of the clients sit between -45 & -65 dBm & between 40-60% quality, is this ok, there maybe some interferance from the location of the AP, its in the roof space above the clients. any ideas would be appreciated. Cheers

[Scott Fella]

Signal between -45 dBm to -72 dBm is good for data clients. You have to make sure you set the channels on your ap's so that you don't have too many co-channel interference. If an ap above is on channel 6, set the close ap's to 1 or 11. what you can alos look at is the signal to noise level and make sure it is around 20 - 25 dBm.

When you say issues authenticating.... do they authenticate at all or not. Are the users able to associate and fail authentication or does the user fail to associate to the ap?

[sorvarit]

Had many such problems with our clients. If you are using WPA/WPA2 encryption on WinXPsp2 try installing theese hotfixes from Microsoft:

KB885453 and KB893357

They have antother also, KB917021, but that makes a mess if you use wireless policies in AD combined with ssids not broadcasted.

[plandobait]

I have seen similar issues with LEAP (I was using 1231 and 1242 autonomous AP's) - some clients worked, some didn't...clients were all that same OS, patch level, chipset, wireless nic, driver, AP's same IOS, etc.

When checking AAA Debugs I would see a client fail authentication with a "Method List Not Found" error. The client would never hit the AAA server for authentication.

I started to notice that this happened to AP's I would copy/paste a config or config change to. I would remove all AAA configs and retype them in manually - never saw that error again.

I recreated/resolved this issue a number of times at different locations.