topic Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director in Access Points - Indoor and Outdoor

Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

jeff_roback — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:06:31 GMT

Based upon reading through the various technotes and forum posts, we've come up with the following command-line optimizations for ruckus deployments. I'd like to hear from Ruckus if all of these are still valid/necessary with current configurations, and/or if anyone else has additional items they find helpful.

These are designed for public-access scenarios with moderate density, and the changes have been particularly focused on increasing compatibility with Mac OS, Apple TV and iOS clients.

1) for each wlan:
wlan "mywlan"
ofdm-only
bss-minrate 5.5
no qos directed-multicast
qos directed-threshold 0
No qos igmp-snooping

2) For each AP group:
ap-group "System Default"
no qos mld-query v1
no qos mld-query v2
no qos igmp-query v2
no qos igmp-query v3
qos query-Interval 0 directed multicast disable

Re: Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

jeff_roback — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:09:39 GMT

I should add that these are in no way recommendations for you to try this in your environment 🙂 Review all documentation and TEST in your environment before deploying...

These are just things I've picked up from reviewing forum posts and reading tech notes. I've been particularly focused on largest common denominator settings that get virtually all clients connected and working without any IT intervention.

Re: Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

primoz_marinsek — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 06:21:01 GMT

It's excellent that there are people like you willing to share their test and results.

One thing I noticed though is that I don't think ofdm-only and bss-minrate 5.5 go together. when you enable ofdm-only the minimum rate is 6.

Re: Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

michael_brado — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 22:28:58 GMT

Two cents to Primoz. Omit the 'ofdm-only' under the WLAN, and you have our
recommendation for Bonjour and non-well-known multicast protocols, that these
commands will flood to wired/wireless clients on the VLAN. The bss-minrate 5.5
will stop using 1mb/2mb, and thus shrinks your coverage radius to tell clients to
consider roaming sooner (specifically implemented to help sticky Apple clients).
By disabling mld/igmp on the AP, you also tell the system to let clients register
and query with multicast groups, not to proxy on their behalves.

Re: Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

jeff_roback — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 07:33:39 GMT

Thanks for the thoughts on this. Why should we omit ofdm-only? I've seen that in several of the best practices documents. My understanding is that the only downsifde of this is blocking 802.11b-only clients, which I'm OK with 🙂 Are there other side-effects?

Jeff

Re: Best Practice Optimization by CLI for Zone Director

primoz_marinsek — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 07:46:14 GMT

As Michael said. Recommendation for using Bonjour is to omit ofdm-only.

But by enabling it it doesn't mean 11b (and the old 802.11 only) clients will be blocked. They just won't be able to connect to a network that uses OFDM-only. They don't understand it since they only speak DSSS and HR-DSSS which is completely different modulation technique.

This is a 2 edged sword mind you. On one hand you're management frames will spend less time occupying the air living more time for actual client data, but If you have many 11b STAs around they could still cause you problems with their signal energy received by your APs and clients.

So by allowing 11b STAs and using a higher minimum rate of 5.5Mbps you hopefully get the better bit of both.