another wireless question god darnit!!

[Little-Miss]

Ok, 20 wireless Netbooks...1 Dlink AP in classroom called wireless and 2 more in the vacinity also called wireless.

5 out of the 15 Netbooks arent connecting. I say its because that maybe 15 are trying to connect to one access point and thats its connection limit, but it seems to be always the same five. LM says i should reimage them, but i might just do that out of curiosity.

They're assigning themselves Apipa IPs obviously because its not connecting to our DHCP.

Any ideas what i can be?

[pooley]

Do the 5 pickup an ip if they are the ONLY ones on and trying to access the Ap?

[Little-Miss]

Good question....according to my LM he tried using just the one netbook and it still wasnt logging onto the domain....

[pooley]

Try logging on as a local user, maybe 1 of the little darlings (Kids or teachers) has disabled the Wifi card.

[PEO]

turn dhcp off on the wireless router

[Little-Miss]

ok....

why is that stopping 5 connecting?

[farmerste]

you might want to check the powersaving features on wireless too, so many manufacturere build this in, and it can cause problems.

[MNHughes]

I think it sounds like a load balancing issue we've had this before as well.

I would get them all running and doing something bandwidth intensive with them and making a note of the ones that disconnect, once they are all reconnected again try the same thing again and see if the same ones disconnect.

Do the devices all have the same netowrk card it may (but unlikely) be the one network card is just that that powerful.

I would also make sure that the wireless card in device manager has its option unticked for power saving, and also check any wireless manufacture software have no power settings configured there as well.

If it is a load balancing problem I would suggest buying a solution (if wireless is used of a large scale) we're with a company called Meru

[Jaco45er]

Hi Little Miss

Some D-link AP's (like the DWL-3200AP's for example) can be configured to accept a limited number of clients and perform load balancing (does it work? no comment ), so might be worth checking the settings. You could check the AP logs to see if the mac addresses of the clients not logging on are actually being rejected by the AP (if it's the AP that's causing the problem).

Ironically there is no "IEEE 802.11 standard", to my knowledge for load balancing (if that is the issue) and in the past I have divided laptops over multiple SSID's to guarantee load balancing, but this has to be replicated across the site so that each wireless cell is present in all required areas (or laptops working in one area won't work in another area).

I totally agree with MN though, throw in a managed "controller" based solution and if your current problems are down to load balancing (could be, could be not ) then the managed wireless solution will take that particular issue out of the equation.

I need to look into Meru, everyone seems to rate it highly.

Jaco

[chilbs]

What access points are you using 7100 or 2100?

If you are using the 7100 and the netbooks are capable of a and g you could config half the netbooks to connect to a and the other half to g. this would increase the bandwidth available.

You could turn down the power setting on the APs and add more APs.

Is the 15 limit something you have set as load balancing in this way on an unmanaged setup is not particularly reliable. I would expect a 7100 to cope with a few more. If one AP is the strongest signal in a room the netbooks will not even bother to try to connect to another AP they will just keep trying to connect to the strongest.

You could apply the registry hack to force the operating system to wait longer before it processes policy and gets to the logon screen. I apply this to all my wireless networks as it ensures that the wireless pc pick up policys and logon more reliably.

Hope this helps

Chilbs