topic Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting in Access Points - Indoor and Outdoor

Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 05:27:39 GMT

Hi all,

We have quite 40 Touchstar Boston 8500 (http://www.touchstar.co.uk/product_mo...) Hand Held Barcode scanners that connect via ZoneFlex 7352 controlled by a Smart Standby Zondirector 1100 to our network.

We have just started testing and what we have found is that the hand held units seem to "disconnect" from the network at random intervals (5-60 minutes) all sleep and power setting are either off or on max. The hand held still has an IP address but the device can no longer access the LAN or can be pinged from any machine within our network. To reconnect we need to put the device in standby mode and then switch it back on, this effectively restarts the network card.

The WLAN card that the handheld has is a Summit, I have found a setting that I thing may be responsible for the drop off's as it may interfere with what the ZoneDirector is trying to do: http://www.summitdata.com/Documents/G...

Agressive Scan is a feature in Summit WLAN cards that actively looks for better Ap's and try's to connect to them, from my understanding the ZoneDirector will transfer the device between Ap's? Would this be culprit?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,
Julius

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:31:05 GMT

Do you have ChannelFly enabled? If so, try disabling it and see if it makes any difference.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:43:31 GMT

Thanks Jazzycow, I am going to give that a try. I have moved to Background Scanning.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:54:51 GMT

I initially didn't have "Automatically adjust AP radio power to optimize coverage when interference is present." Enabled but have switched it on for testing.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

dominic_simpson — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 16:54:34 GMT

Hi Jazzycow, have given that a go. It is happening less now but the symptoms still persist. Any other thoughts?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 17:13:29 GMT

Is now CF on or off?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 05:45:11 GMT

Hi Primoz, no CF is off. We thought that it would be better to leave it off to eliminate the amount of traffic going to the clients. Is it better to have it ON? What are the benefits?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 05:46:56 GMT

There has been a new development in the situation, we have added a few laptops to the wireless network and now the laptops are experiencing the same thing. So this is no longer isolated to hand held devices only. We have isolated the issue to occur while the connected devices are migrating between AP's.

Any thoughts any one?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 07:12:04 GMT

IS it allways one or 2 APs that this occurs on or all of them?

Which FW are you using? Have you upgraded to 9.6.1? Did the upgrade go through to all the APs OK?

Do you have a spectral analyzer and an L2 analyzer you can use to help with this?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:41:02 GMT

Hi Primoz, it's all of them. We had also once thought it was one or two AP's but this has happened to many oof them

All I have is Wifi Analyzer app on my android phone.

We are still on FW 9.5.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:43:39 GMT

9.5.2 or still 9.5.0?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:59:43 GMT

9.5.1.0 build 50

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 10:23:48 GMT

How is the network set-up there? is it a simple "flat" network or more sofisticated with VLANs, with L3 roaming?

Could you try tunneling a particular SSID to the ZD and see if it helps?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 10:27:19 GMT

It's a simple flat network, no VLAN's.

We have switched it on now, will update you in about 60 mins of any changes.

Thanks for your help.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:28:01 GMT

Please copy and paste from the RF info of a few APs all lines under the below 2 subjects

------------ PHY Error Stats ------------

and

------------ Airtime Stats ------------

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:49:42 GMT

WASP005
------------ PHY Error Stats ------------
6896450 PHY errors since clearing all stats (rx_phyerr)
1 phy cck restart
5577245 phy ofdm group
1319204 phy cck group
0 PHY errors since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
Histogram of PHY errors per second (pcttime in each range)
0 1-500 ..1K ..2K ..5K ..10K ..20K ..50K .100K more
20 76 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

------------ Airtime Stats ------------
Airtime utilized (percent) since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
Busy: 0 RX: 11 TX: 3 Total: 14
Histograms of airtime (pcttime in each range) since clearing all stats
0 0-10 ..20 ..30 ..40 ..50 ..60 ..70 ..80 ..90 ..100
busy: 92 7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
rx: 0 94 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tx: 5 95 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tot: 0 89 9 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

WASP009
------------ PHY Error Stats ------------
8089188 PHY errors since clearing all stats (rx_phyerr)
5445398 phy ofdm group
2643790 phy cck group
0 PHY errors since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
Histogram of PHY errors per second (pcttime in each range)
0 1-500 ..1K ..2K ..5K ..10K ..20K ..50K .100K more
15 81 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 0

------------ Airtime Stats ------------
Airtime utilized (percent) since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
Busy: 0 RX: 8 TX: 1 Total: 9
Histograms of airtime (pcttime in each range) since clearing all stats
0 0-10 ..20 ..30 ..40 ..50 ..60 ..70 ..80 ..90 ..100
busy: 91 8 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
rx: 0 90 9 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tx: 5 94 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tot: 0 78 17 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

WASP012
------------ PHY Error Stats ------------
83606678 PHY errors since clearing all stats (rx_phyerr)
6 phy cck restart
60633540 phy ofdm group
22973132 phy cck group
6 PHY errors since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
6 phy cck restart
Histogram of PHY errors per second (pcttime in each range)
0 1-500 ..1K ..2K ..5K ..10K ..20K ..50K .100K more
16 80 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0

------------ Airtime Stats ------------
Airtime utilized (percent) since clearing delta stats (1 sec)
Busy: 0 RX: 7 TX: 2 Total: 9
Histograms of airtime (pcttime in each range) since clearing all stats
0 0-10 ..20 ..30 ..40 ..50 ..60 ..70 ..80 ..90 ..100
busy: 94 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
rx: 0 85 13 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tx: 7 93 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
tot: 0 75 21 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:56:21 GMT

Well. It' probably not interference. It looks pretty clean.

Is tunneling helping?

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

julius_kisieli1 — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:58:52 GMT

Unfortunately not really, we are going to upgrade to 9.6 now. Thanks for looking at our logs.

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:25:00 GMT

OK. Recommend you go 9.6 then 9.6.1

Re: Touchstar Boston 8500 Handheld Scanner Disconnecting

primoz_marinsek — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 05:37:28 GMT

Run an AP-ZD SpeedTest for every AP. Is there any packet loss?