ZF2942 Upgrade to 9.7.0.0.220 causes problems

[sven_jaanson]

Upgrading standalone 2942 AP from 9.6.1.0.15 to 9.7.0.0.220 makes only troubles for us.
I have 2x 2942 standalone AP's. After upgrade both of them needed factory reset to gain access to the web console. Also I had to reconfigure from scratch.
Thats bad...
But after upgrade I faced issues where all connected clients suddenly become disconnected clients.. I had no time to investigate this issue further, so I downgraded my AP's to 9.6.1.0.15.

Note: This topic was created from a reply on the ZoneFlex 9.7.0.0.220 GA Release Now Available topic.

[peter_dohm]

Keith, FYI, both of these symptoms definitely happen on my stand-alone 7982. I had to factory reset it to get it to do anything, and after doing so and completely reconfiguring it, after some time, one of the two radios just seems to stop sending beacons altogether...

guys, this is really not acceptable. do you no regression testing for stand-alone devices?

[keith_redfield]

Actually we do. And as a matter of fact I run 9.7 on my standalone ZF7982 with absolutely no issues. So...as they say on SNL - What's up with that?? The answer of course is that there's something different about our two environments. (We also have ZF2942's in our lab that upgraded with no issue)

Think about how many of those differences there could be, and then multiply them against each other - that's combinatorial math. Pretty soon you've got more combinations then there are hydrogen atoms in the universe.

Thus far, your's is the only report on the 7982. Have you tried downgrading? Is there some feature in 9.7 you need? (very very few of our new features work on standalone APs..) If not, I'd recommend a downgrade to your prior release. If it's still not working after that, I would bet you've had an unfortunate, and coincidental, hardware failure.

Luckily that unit has a limited lifetime warranty.

The ZF2942 is an End Of Life product with extremely limited memory and CPU resources. It wasn't a surprise that it might not upgrade cleanly under certain conditions (though our tests did not show it initially). All evidence so far points to that problem being simple resource starvation.

The ZF7982 is a much newer model with much greater memory and CPU resources, so I'd be very surprised that it would have the same issue.

[peter_dohm]

so keith, the reason i upgraded at the earliest possible time is because i ran into another issue with the 5ghz radios on the previous release, and i expected that this one would be fixed (it was) but now there is yet another issue to hve taken its place. i've been doing this dance far longer than seems possible...

see, i wouldn't fault your logic one iota (i too make products for which there are mind boggling configuration permutations) except that i'm running horrifically boring stock stand alone bridged configurations and the 7982 is simply not as reliable as I'd expect out of such a fine product.

can you recommend a release that has rock solid 2.4 and 5 ghz performance in stand alone bridged mode?

[keith_redfield]

I think you need to open a support case. I'm not aware of any software-related issues on the 7982 similar to what you describe.

[peter_dohm]

so, just to be sure, before i opened a case, i just reset the device using the hard reset switch one more time and tried re-configuring the most simplistic config again. when i did so, everything worked fine (the only thing i knowingly changed is the pass phrases used to generate the AES WPA2 keys). i tried changing the smallest number of things i could from a default configuration, and it now seems stable on both bands.

i am at an utter loss to explain why my 5ghz radio was simply not sending beacons after a time on the last two tries at this... i can tell you that i did do soft-factory-resets of the device (both via gui and command line) before honing in on the final configuration, so there could conceivably be something slightly different between soft reset and hard reset i suppose..

the entirety of everything i've changed includes:

the administrative username / password
the NTP ip address (left it get its WAN address & DNS via DHCP)
the 2.4 Ghz channel to 1 (from smartselect, wireless survey shows me this is ideal)
the 5ghz channel to 161 (from smartselect, wireless survey shows me this is ideal)
set the 2.4 Ghz wlan0 ssid, & wpa2 aes psk
set the 5 Ghz wlan8 ssid & wpa2 aes psk

heck if i know what was wrong... i'll keep an eye on this...