Hi Everyone,
I’m a Dude n00b, and glad to be a part of the community!
Please help me with the following scenario:
I have a small Wi-Fi network with 3 AP’s (2 Ubiquity Piko’s, 1 Linksys), most users online around 20-30. Users are complaining that their Wi-Fi signal drops several times an hour and they have to reconnect.
I set-up Dude’s Probe to Ping all 3 AP’s and a few other workstations as follow:
Probe Interval: 3 seconds
Probe Timeout: 7 seconds
Probe Down Count: 2 seconds
As far as I understand, Dude will ping device each 3 seconds, if it’s down after 3 seconds, Dude will wait 14 seconds before reporting it as DOWN? Please correct me on this if I misunderstand.
Once I set-up these Ping Probes, Dude reports that AP’s go up/down 3-4 times an hour! Each time they go down, it’s down for about 15 seconds or so. If I do continuous ping (ping ip -t), my ping also shows as “timed out” for about 15 seconds. - Is this normal!? AP’s go down like that randomly, no pattern. Linksys is a bit more stable than Ubiquity, and goes down few times a day. They all come back UP after 15-20 seconds.
If I look at Syslog of those AP’s, it seem to indicate that the AP is down, and it “disassociates” all users, goes back UP in 15 seconds, and then, it “associates” all of those users back. Not 100% sure though how or why it goes “down”.
The weird thing is that some of the desktops also report these random 10-20 seconds of NO PING several times a day! Not just AP’s.
Question:
The Probe time that I set-up (3 and 7 seconds, 2 timeouts), is it too sensitive? All of these Pings are happening on a LAN, which is only used for Internet (2dsl lines). And I don’t see any reason why those AP’s should NOT return Ping packets for 15-20 seconds several times an hour.
We tried adding UPS battery to AP’s, replaced switch to Linksys/Cisco one, replaced AP’s, no luck so far.
Am I wrong?
Is my troubleshooting approach make sense?
Any tips or suggestions on troubleshooting these frequent “user drops”?
Thank You!