Connectivity Issues on ZoneFlex r300 series not sure what else to do

[justin_daughert]

Recently we started having issues with 1 access point in particular.  We have 3 sites with around 35 access points total.  At the site I'm having issues there are 6 points.  All but one seem to be working as normal without major issues.  This specific access point allows individuals to join the network but will repeatedly drop their connection with about 5-10 second delay and then reconnect them.  Some of the tests the students take here are not cached and it's causing them to have to log out and start over. 

Things I have done:

1) Replaced access point with a good/known working access point

2) replaced cable ends on both the switch it's connected to and the end connected to the access point.

3) Moved the access point to a different switch (there were 4 access points on this switch to begin with, I just did this last night so results are pending).

4) Looking at the access point I noticed a high rf pollution.  All other access points are around 11-20 this one was at 60.  Not sure if this is an issue or not but assuming that rf would be radio frequency and could be causing interference?

5) I've attempted to look through the zone director logs, but with so many access points it's a bit of a needle in a hay stack on trying to find any useful information.

I guess my question is what would normally cause drops of connectivity?  I expect a few drops here and there are normal.  But this is a daily occurrence that is much worse then any other spot.  It seems to happen at random.  5 students might get booted off, get reconnected then 3 might get kicked off, reconnecting etc.  No real pattern that I can find.  It's never been 100% down for everyone at any given time. 

I've tried reading forums, articles etc and haven't found anything that has helped.  Where should I start in my troubleshooting?  Thank you in advance for any and all suggestions.

[justin_daughert]

I have been watching this for the last 30 minutes or so to see if I noticed anything and found something interesting.  The access point disconnected completely, checked the switch and the port was showing it was down.  When the access point came back up it says that uptime is over 16 hours (so form the time I rebooted it last night).  That seems odd to me, if the port on the switch showed it down and the access point was down.  Wouldn't the uptime reset back to 0?   Wondering if this access point is dropping people because it's consistently going down and up.  Would this be a possible fault in the cat6 cable?  Thoughts?

[it_registration]

I'm guessing the AP isn't going down? Or is it?  Do pings to if fail when your encountering the problem?

Also are you running your AP's on POE from the switch?  Maybe try a POE injector in place of the the POE switch?  Just an idea.

[justin_daughert]

It doesn't appear to go down.  But I'm not 100% certain.  The status will just randomly show down instead of connected.  I'm running a continuous ping to that access point and it started to fail pings after about the 40th attempt.  But the zone director still shows the access point as being up.  

On a continuous ping I got 54 successful and 37 lost on the problem access point.  Testing the access point down the hall from it I had 85 successful 0 lost.  Starting to think this is a cabling issue since I've replaced the AP with a known working AP.  Moved it to an entirely different switch that has no other AP's connected to it. 

Yes all of our AP's are POE from the switches.  Same switches on all 35 AP's across the board and this is the only one I've had issues with.  Is there a recommended amount of POE devices per switch?  I thought that maybe it wasn't able to draw enough power, hence moving it to a switch with no other POE devices connected to it.  But same issues,  I'm have tempted to go run a new cable in the ceiling and see where that gets me.  Just don't want to chase ghosts.

*Edit*  Ran the ping tests again.  Ran fine for 156 pings, then started getting request time outs for about 10 pings.  Don't know if that tells you anything further.  Other access points don't seem to ever fail.

[it_registration]

Ruckus (and other vendors) had some issues with POE chips awhile back.  They recommend seperating your AP's on to different switches or modules within the switch.

the Zonedirectors, in my experience do not provide real-time stats.