topic Re: Trying to troubleshoot periodic disconnects in Wireless Questions and Best Practices

Trying to troubleshoot periodic disconnects

gleb_boundin — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 20:21:06 GMT

I'm trying to troubleshoot users who complain that their wi-fi periodically drops out, then automatically re-connects about 30 seconds later. We are using the ZD1200, version 10.1.1.0.55, with 4 R720s and one ZF7982 AP. About 90 total clients, mostly MacOS. Our primary SSID is set to broadcast only on the 5 GHz radio, since we are in downtown Manhattan and 2.4 GHz is basically unusable.

Using Netspot, I've done the basic signal-to-noise and RF interference mapping, and everything looks okay as far as SNR ratio. I've also used Netspot's "Discover" mode to track a single AP's signal over time. With the client laptop running Netspot positioned directly under the AP, I'm still seeing periodic signal drops for about 30 seconds (see attached picture).

I read somewhere that MacOS doesn't play too nicely with ChannelFly, so I switched to Background Scanning and that seems to have improved things a little, but I still see occasional drops. The AP logs don't show anything related to the drops (the most recent entry on this AP's Events/Activites tab is from March 4th).

I pulled a debug log based on this client laptop's MAC address with "Access Points" and "Client Association" debug components checked, but when I load the debug file into the Log Analysis tool, I don't really know where to look to analyze this specific client drop from this AP at such and such a time (e.g. this specific client dropped signal from this specific AP at 3:01 PM today- why?)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Re: Trying to troubleshoot periodic disconnects

erin_mcclellen — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 21:27:37 GMT

Just curious, and this is in no way questioning what you found, but I kept reading (possibly outdated) white papers/docs that Channel Fly is the good option in some environments. It's super frustrating that the information available here is so scattered. I don't know if this is to push people towards opening tickets instead of doing research or if there is just a lack of resources to update and provide guides for common use cases, but it's annoying.

Oh, also could you note where you found the OS-X ChannelFly stuff? I almost forgot to note I'm running into a similar issue.

Re: Trying to troubleshoot periodic disconnects

gleb_boundin — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 21:46:57 GMT

The first place I saw the Background Channel recommendation was on the r/networking subreddit. There's a post from a year ago called "Ruckus WiFi Issue" and someone in the comments said that Macs can have a hard time with channel changes, so Channelfly should be disabled. I figured I would give it a try. I also found a blog post titled "Optimize Ruckus Configuration- Part 2" on a blog called The Network Stack, which also recommended Background Scanning over Channelfly. Since I made the change, the signal drops have definitely decreased, but they haven't gone away completely.

Re: Trying to troubleshoot periodic disconnects

gleb_boundin — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 14:30:49 GMT

Does anyone know how to use the Log Analyzer? Where exactly do I look in the Log Analysis Tool to figure out why client X disconnected from AP Y at timestamp Z?