I seem to have a strange problem, I have some RB411R boards in an enclosure with directional antennas. They are all running 4.6 L4 along with a Routerboard switch which handles the dhcp for a Class B address space. We are sending out UDP packets to all the wifi devices attached but it seems that even though this should be going out only 2 devices seem to update regularly while the others are very slow and are often randomly picked up. The strange thing was that I was testing this out on webtomato on the WRT54GL first and it works fine, the packets arrive and they don’t seem to get dropped and all devices update almost the same time.
Is there something that I’m missing that or shouldn’t have done when setting up this equipment?
I have the ap’s in ap-bridge mode, then bridge the wlan and the Ethernet device. DHCP come from the routerboard device. It seems like it should be a super simple setup but just still running into these sorts of issues.
And the DHCP server is on the bridge interface on the AP? When you say broadcast UDP packets are being dropped, are you referring to the DHCP broadcast packets not getting from the AP to the client? Or is the DHCP server behind the AP in another RB device?
The DHCP server is on a RB750G. It’s giving out a class b private IP for devices. Each AP is backed into the RB750G.
I had a similar setup with 4 Linksys WRT54GL’s running Tomato (sort of like DD-WRT) but those devices can’t handle up to 100 clients just connecting to the AP let along serve data. One device would run as a DHCP server, and the other 3 were AP’s all on different channels. This system works well when there are in the range of 80 to 130 clients connected across the 3 AP’s. I had to move to this quickly because it was proven for a number of devices.
It’s an odd problem, I can’t seem to find any firewall or storm control which would stop the device from getting the UDP. Just 2 out of 6 (all sitting next to eachother) would run fine and get updates while the other 4 would either hang or get nothing.
Anyone have a number of the max associated clients to 1 AP? These are iPhones. I though that at RB would handle 100 clients per AP. I have been talking with a company which provides wifi for festivals and they claim they get 800+ users on one 3radio AP which I find really had to believe.
Without more info, it is going to be hard to work out what you have done wrong. If the DHCP server is not directly on the interface serving the clients, then you have to ensure the broadcast traffic can get from the backend RB750G to the front end RB411’s serving the clients. You do not say if you have IP addresses assigned to any of these interfaces (the RB411’s wan1, ether1 interfaces and RB750’s etherX interfaces) so it is very difficult to work out the problem with so little information.
Just saying it worked with other devices does not help.
I find it hard that anyone can claim to serve 800 clients on 3 radios. But if you have 800 clients that do nothing but sit there idle and no traffic. Maybe. So I share your scepticism.
if the clients are roaming between those 3 radios, then you probably should ping the udp sender machine from the iphones so they can “announce” their presence there. I’m thinking about some sort of arp problem here. Can you test this?