Wireless clients bouncing up and down

[tcasartello]

We have a Cisco Unified wireless network on our college campus. There's an area of one of our dormitories where people are having an issue where they keep disassociating and reassociating to our wireless network. We have pretty dense coverage in that area (generally get about 5 bars,) and I haven't seen the issue in other areas on our campus. Anything in the area I should look for that could be causing that problem, or could it be a problem with out setup.

[John Cook]

This is pretty much the same issue we are having as a result of CSCta29484. The APs are down long enough to force the client to roam, and up long enough to let them roam back. I didn't see what APs you were using, but ours are 1231s. To confirm, enable telnet/ssh on the AP and issue "show controller dot11 0 | i Beacons" every couple of seconds for about a minute and you'll see "Beacons are disabled" in the output for a period of about 10 seconds at a stretch. Reboot the AP and it's fine for a while. TAC says it will be fixed in the next maint release. -JC

[tcasartello]

Yes tac is starting to point us in that direction too. In areas where this was happening I found a client with that particular power saving mode. I turned WMM off campus wide and rebooted all APs. I'm keeping an eye on a few clients now.

[tcasartello]

Is it normal for beacons on an AP to EVER be shut off? I noticed once while doing that that they shut off for a split second (certainly not 10 seconds)

[droback]

Hey - We at Hamilton College are having EXACTLY the same issue. We run only b/g in the dorms. This just started this semester (upgraded WISms to 6.0.182.0 code in August) - We had been running for 2 years without any issues.

We are working with TAC also and are trying a few different things on these radios. I'll keep you posted.

[John Cook]

I asked the same question of TAC and they indicated that it is normal to see beacons disabled while the AP was off channel scanning. When the beacons are off due to the bug, multiple iterations of the command show it disabled for a total of 10 seconds or so (at least on our network).

[bm_5789]

I would like to look into the issue of interrupted beacons. Can you tell me how it is possible to enable telnet/ssh on a lwapp access point? TIA

[FilipOlsen]

Hi JC.

We're running AIR-AP1242AG-E-K9 with 12.4(21a)JA1 and having the same issue.

Will a downgrade help us ?

[michael.hinz]

Hello All,

I believe the beaconing issue has been addressed with a new firmware release for the wireless controllers that came out 2 days ago. We experienced similar problems as described in this posting and have noticed an improvement since we applied the new release.

The new version is: 6-0-188-0.

The problem was most noticeable to our voice users. We also had to update the 7925 phones to code 1.3.3.0.3 that can be requested via a TAC case. Talk about perfect storm in a wireless environment when everything has problems and it gets hard to identify a single source when in reality everything has issues....

[John Cook]

Just curious, but what was the issue that was corrected in the phone firmware? Have you had any other issues with the new code? -John

[FilipOlsen]

Hi John...

This is the phone bug list:

Build 1.3.3.0.3 (11/02/09 - rel_1_3_3)

CSCtc36980 7921 running 1.3.3.0.2 stuck in "Configuring IP" after deauth

CSCtc43993 Should not make WLAN go active with ClearPrompt SCCP msg

CSCtc44631 CUCM: JPN: 7925 cannot select menu/help more than 36 bytes

CSCtc54410 7925 with voice gaps with inbound/outbound PSTN calls

CSCtc73949 7921 hangs due to DSP CPU Time starvation/DSP MMU abort

CSCtc88591 add Wistron LCM phone to supported HW_REV list

Build 1.3.3.0.2 (09/09/09 - rel_1_3_3)

CSCta47991 Missing beacon improvements in firmware

CSCtb45669 792x is not reprovisioning after receiving Wavelink package

CSCtb49823 support for virtual host web server on 7921 and 7925

CSCtb55584 7925G phones MWI light not properly displayed in deviceinformationx

Build 1.3.3.0.1 (08/13/09 - rel_1_3_3)

CSCta21688 Certificate download report MAC error and unhandled page fault

CSCta24387 Support Restriction Bit in CallInfo

CSCta28990 792xG can intermittently get stuck with empty prompt message after power

CSCta35313 7921 misinterpretes Idle URL with & (ampersand) character

CSCta38016 REFRESH header being triggered out of context

CSCta46131 CP-7921G NOT handle multiple entries in the DNS response

CSCta85098 Date/Time can get reset if the 7925 battery is drained

CSCtb12622 Auto logon on Personal Address Book is not working.

CSCtb24430 792X:call transfer using directory search failed

CSCtb37829 TSpec failure leads to chronic no_scan_complete failures

We had this issue with 7925G om CME 7.1

http://forum.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/NetProf?page=netprof&forum=Wireless%20-%20Mobility&topic=Wireless%20IP%20Voice%20and%20Video&CommCmd=MB%3Fcmd%3Dpass_through%26location%3Doutline%40%5E1%40%40.2cd4d7de

New firmware got rid of our problem...

BTW , we have seen the 7925G phone resets a couple of time during the day.. i dont know if any of you guys have had the same problem ?... anyways.. 1.3.3.0.3 seem to have solved that too.. i hope :-P

[michael.hinz]

Hello Filip,

We had a big eye opener with Cisco on Wednesday.  We had the whole time problems with the 7925 even after the firmware upgrade of the wireless controller/APs and the phones.  The problems ranged from very poor voice quality, to dropped calls, to a nerving clicking in the voice,... The wired thing was that this had nothing to do with roaming since even users that were sitting in the same room as an AP had these issues.  They might have had a great day, but then again all the sudden had static background noise, voice distortion, interrupted voice streams, ...  We tested 7921's and softphones and did not run into these problems while being at the same location as the 7925s.  We tested this with an internal conf call from a 7961 that involved the WiFI phone types (7921, 7925, IP Soft phone) and walked the same path.  Only the 7925 showed really bad quality while the other ones had very good results.  We asked Cisco  a couple of times for the differences between the phones and constantly were told that the main difference is that the 7925 has bluetooth built in and is more ruggadized.  Other than that it is pretty much the same as the 7921.

I don't know why, but Cisco TAC still wanted me to troubleshoot the 7925s.  Since this did not come to a conclusion after another 3 weeks management gave an ultimatum.  This resulted in a new Cisco TAC support person who went through the same tests again.  When we asked him again for differences in the phones we had a revalation - the 7921 has two antennas and supports diverse path but the 7925 has only one antenna and can't handle multipath well.  This finally answered a lot of our questions and we are now no longer looking into wireless issues but device issues.  Cisco is going to replace all our 7925's with 7921's.

I wish this information would have been disclosed earlier to us since it would have helped us tremendously with the project .  I also don't understand why Cisco takes such an important feature away from its "next generation" phones....

Mike

[Leo Laohoo]

Our APs were 1250s running 12.4(21a)JA1.  APs that were configured as WDS refuse to take any clients, including the phones (CP-7921/7925).  The phones will associate to any APs even (except the WDS) if the WDS is the nearest and/or has the strongest signal.  It is as if the WDS is refusing any associating/authenticating request.

Everything started normalizing when I downgraded all the AP's to 12.4(10b)JDA3.

I've created a TAC Case and after 2 weeks or so, the agent was unable to replicate my issue.  I didn't care.  This problem was affecting a number of sites and only an IOS downgrade fixes it.

[FilipOlsen]

Jep.. We did the AP downgrade too and a firmaware upgrade on phones and now we have a pretty steady wireless network.

[FilipOlsen]

Hello Mike.

Im sorry to hear you're still having problems

We are "out of trouble" now and it seems to work fine (fingers crossed)

Thank you for info on antennas..Still , Cisco must have had a reason for taking away the second antenna ?

Our users are so happy with the new bluetooth feature in 7925G and it will be a pain to replace them with 7921.

Lets hope for a new well improved 7926G in near future

-Olsen.

[etmarcof]

Hello Flipp,

I have recently migrated from 7920 phones 7925 (1.3.3) phones and i' m having problems in outdoor area. Voice gaps,no association,no audio etc.

7920 phones and 7921 (1.3.2) are working fine in these same Area. My outdoor AP's are 1231 and 1300 with one 5dB omni-directional antennas each.

My WLC is on 5.0.148.0 version.

It seems to me thats could be a firmware issue did you have to open a case to requeste firmware version 1.3.3.0.3?

In you case upgrading only phone firmware didn't help right?

Thanks

best regards,

MC