Firmware Versioning and R700 Dropped Connection Problems

[davidgyang]

I run an office with about 80-100 users (maybe 120-150 devices of laptops/phones).  I'm currently using 2 Netgear R7000s behind a pfSense device and it's OK with some slowness.  I decided to try adding a Ruckus R700 after a recommendation from a friend to see if I could replace my infrastructure with Ruckus stuff but have been very disappointed with it's performance out of the box.

Few questions:

1.  Can someone explain the versioning system to me?  I see 9.8.x, 9.9.x, 9.12.x and the 100.x line of firmware.  If I want to run the R700s behind the pfSense as routers which firmware should I be using the maximize stability?  The release notes aren't that helpful. 

2.  I've turned off SmartSelect since it was constantly jumping and dropping connections.  However, I still see behavior where all the 5G connections will just die (the router is still reachable if I jump onto a R7000 and connect to the web interface).

I've played around with some wireless configuration options (hardcoded channel, 20, 40, 80 Mhz) without any luck resolving the stability issues.  It's hard for me to believe that a $1k device can't outperform a $200 device so I'm assuming it's something on my end - would appreciate any advice or help to get these up and running.

[davidgyang]

I'm currently running the 100.1.0.0.194 firmware (the newest one from the downloads section) and getting these disconnects.  The client right now is the newest Macbook Pro 15" Retina with the latest 10.10.4 OS that's having the disconnect issues.

I'm going to downgrade to the 9.8.2 firmware recommended by Monnat and see if that improves things, I'm mostly hoping to optimize for stability (even the Netgear's have been mostly reliable with 60-70 clients) and I can't get stability here with 2-3 clients.

In terms of the space, we're in a open office layout and there's only a door and a single wall between me and the AP most of the time.

[john_d]

Yeah, that's kind of surprising, and I don't think switching down to 9.8.2 (btw, use 9.8.3 please -- 9.8.3 is a security update to 9.8.2). It might help to post / pastebin / whatever your support logs. You can get support logs from your AP's web admin console, but remember to search through for your WPA passphrase, as IIRC it's in one of the configuration sections of that log.

It'd help to know the timestamp or MAC address of the disconnecting clients.

But there must be something interesting about your setup because I've got the exact same types of clients and they behave fine.