topic Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector in Access Points - Indoor and Outdoor

AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

jonathan_marlow — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:38:51 GMT

I have Ruckus products in all of my offices... we have a few sites that are connected via VPN to the main site and others are on an MPLS connection... When any of the sites loses connectivity to the main site, the ZD becomes unreachable... When this happens, nobody can connect to the wireless network until connections to the main site are restored... I understand that this may be the proper behavior by design, but it's a bit of a problem...

I need to have some sort of a backup plan for when someone comes into the office and the network is unavailable... is there a way to have the AP's use their last config until the ZD comes back?

here's a very similar topic, but it was almost a year old, so I thought it best to open another...
https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruc...

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

michael_brado — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:38:50 GMT

Try to keep your MPLS VPN up/connected is the best advice. Your APs will lose
heartbeat connectivity with the ZD and eventually reboot after the Auto-Recovery
period of time you may have set on Configure/APs page, AP Policies.

More importantly, your remote clients will not be able to use any back-end auth
methods that involve the ZD, AAA servers, HotSpot, WebAuth, or communicate
over any Tunneled WLANs, however your clients using any L2 type of connection,
like WPA2-PSK will still have access to local resources (servers/printers), until the
APs reboot. Clients connected by the other methods will have local resource
access, until they roam (and cannot re-authenticate).

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

jonathan_marlow — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:45:14 GMT

so, in other words, the only way to keep my wireless up at those sites that lose connectivity is to not lose connectivity? That's pretty rough... I have an Airnet from Cisco that happily continues working when the internet is out at one of my sites even though it cannot contact its controller, which happens to be across the country... I guess I just thought that Ruckus should be able to do this if Cisco can...

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

michael_brado — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:53:24 GMT

Yes, WLANS configured with Open or PSK authentication, which are not tunneled
back to the ZD, will still continue to provide service at the remote sites, to local
resources, just not the Internet too.

They will continue to do so for at least as long as your auto-recovery reboot period.

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

jonathan_marlow — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:56:47 GMT

but once they reboot for auto-recovery, if the ZD isn't available, it won't even revert back to any sort of defaults? No matter what the configuration is, once the ZD is unavailable, the clock is ticking... once the clock counts down and it attempts to reboot, that's it until the ZD comes back, right?

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

michael_brado — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 19:03:50 GMT

Hi Jonathan, for more detail, see "Autonomous WLANs" in a ZD User Guide.
With this designation, an Open or PSK WLAN maintains authorized client
connections/services, when the remote AP and ZD aren't communicating.

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

jason_puckett_7 — Tue, 19 May 2015 13:01:36 GMT

Have a ZD1100 that is not recovering after FDISK and attempted reload of image through the web recovery. No boot. Is there something I could do through the console to clear anything and make it boot?

Is there a way that I can login to the "Island-" broadcast and reconfigure that AP to operate stand-alone, so that I can at least get some coverage until a resolution on the ZD? If not, what's the best way to go about that? Do I have to physically take it down and reset it?

Thanks for your help.

Re: AP no longer showing SSID when disconnected from ZoneDirector

michael_brado — Tue, 19 May 2015 18:01:31 GMT

Hi Jason, this is a little off topic from the original thread, and I'm sorry your ZD won't recover from FDISK reformat and attempt to reload firmware.
We have an article on how to access a disconnected AP during the period it's advertising the recovery Island SSID, before it reboots and starts over.

https://support.ruckuswireless.com/answers/000001524

Follow the recovery steps thru Step 3, to access the AP broadcasting Island SSID, then update for standalone use.
You may still want to do a factory default and perhaps load 100.1.x.x.x base image, if your ZD was on 9.9 or 9.10.