I have several outdoor rb532a which use the pacific wireless aluminum die cast outdoor enclosure. All are running 2.9.26.
I have 2 that have been mounted for over 6 months and they have no problems. What is strange is that I have another 2 of them that after a few weeks from install now act very strange. They were working fine initially, even though there was a couple of hard rains, but then just last week they decided to do one of several strange things.
They will show the SSIDs of the hotspots, but when you try to connect the router will not even attempt to give you an address via DHCP.
I have 6 SSIDs on one routers radio, and some SSIDs will show at times and at other times some will not show up no matter how many times you refresh your search for SSIDs.
Sometimes a certain SSID will actually go through the process of giving you an IP address, but once connected, then it immediately disconnects, and then oddly the laptop can now see the entire list of all of the SSIDs on that radio and they appear available again (as if everthing went back to normal). However, if you try to connect, it will not even go to the point of trying to give you an address via DHCP, and then some of the SSIDs will disappear again.
Very confusing. Is this what a router acts like if it has a moisture problem?? The routers are at completely different locations and were installed on different dates.
What is the best thing for me to try first. Should I try completely reconfiguring the routers first, or should I go get the routers and open the enclosures and see if there is moisture? If a reconfig did not work, would you try changing just the radio first or try replacing the rb532 first?
Thanks for any helpful feedback from any of you guys who have been successfully using the routers in outdoor environments…
It almost sounds to me like your radio’s were damaged in the storms. What is the noise floor at on the AP? Are you using omni’s mounted at the highest point of your tower/structure by any chance? From the AP what is your signal strength when you try to connect to it?
Mositure had nothing to do with it. The outdoor cases were very sound. The change out of equipment on site fix nothing. I took it away and flahsed the router and reloaded it, but that probably was not necessary because it did the same thing once put back on site.
I changed frequencies and it works fine now. For some reason channel 11 was fine before, but now it is completely screwed up in that particular area. I found that channel 1 seemed to be less busy than channel 6 so I set it to 3 and it works fine.
The second router I was having problems with was actually “within earshot” of the first router, and it was also on 11. I switched it to 3 and it works great again too.
Can anyone guide me to posts in the forum that talk about a way to determine what device was put on channel 11 that has screwed up that channel for everyone else in the area? (There are not that many devices nearby on that channel (as seen via netstumbler). There are more than when I originally installed the routers, but not that many more.)
Is it feasable that someone setup a device on channel 11 and it is just chattering so much that it makes the channel only work sporadically like I originally tmentioned in my first post?
Either way, at least I know moisture was not at fault…
hmm, could also be that routeros atheros driver malfunctions when receiving certain unexpected packets. i have seen similar behavior on 2.4 ghz when ap interface was bridging.