Last chance for Ruckus

[Homeland]

About a month or so ago we evaluated a Ruckus wireless solution from Net-Ctrl, they kindly sent us a 1000 series ZD, 2 7363 AP’s and a 7982 AP. The configuration of the ZD seemed extremely straight forward and easy to do only taking around 10 mins at the most.

 

I gave the ZD a static IP address then checked the ZD and AP’s were all on the latest firmware, after reading so much about Ruckus on here and it was within the budget I had left over I was very keen to try it and for it to work.

 

Early indications were good with over 100 ipods and ipads connecting with ease over 2 AP’s in 2 classrooms next to each other, all looked good until one of the teacher got the laptop trolley out which consists of 30 Dell Latitudes running 54Mbps wireless G. They failed miserably taking around 20 mins to log on and then still not all of them connected, it was a major disappointment as with our bodged up hybrid solution the laptops never had a problem logging on which was proved when it was re-installed after the evaluation was sent back.

 

The AP’s were powered by the mains thus eliminating POE problems and connected through to a3-Com GB switch, the school is an old building with walls made of concrete and steel as it was designed to be bomb proof, I realise people will mention interference but why does it not effect the hybrid solution we currently have ??

 

I still want Ruckus to succeed so I upgraded all the laptop wireless cards to 802.11N 2.4Ghz and have arranged another evaluation with CPLTD who are sending me a ZD and 7982 AP’s arriving on Monday. Does anybody have any configuration suggestions that might help i.e. should I disable the 5Ghz channel as I have no devices that run on this, can the controller issue its own DHCP if so should this be preferred to hopefully aid connection.

 

We only run one SSID for the whole school and do not currently VLAN anything, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as if this fails again I won’t be investing in Ruckus at all.

[Chris_Cook]

Some things I would check are:

 

On your dhcp server, check you havn't run out of addresses.

Maybe try just the laptops on their own.

On the zone director web interface, see what the clients are doing, and where they are failing.

Check the logs on the laptops. Its a bit of a long shot, but you might get some useful info.

 

We had a problem with some of our old laptops where they didn't talk wpa2, only wpa. The network would still show up and try to connect, but would fail. We fixed this with a driver update. Check your authentication is the same on ruckus as on your old system.

[Homeland]

Some things I would check are:

 

On your dhcp server, check you havn't run out of addresses.

Maybe try just the laptops on their own.

On the zone director web interface, see what the clients are doing, and where they are failing.

Check the logs on the laptops. Its a bit of a long shot, but you might get some useful info.

 

We had a problem with some of our old laptops where they didn't talk wpa2, only wpa. The network would still show up and try to connect, but would fail. We fixed this with a driver update. Check your authentication is the same on ruckus as on your old system.

We did try the laptops on there own and there was no improvement, we have plenty of addresses and the ZD was running WPA2 with AES the same as our hybrid system at the moment.

[MicrodigitUK]

30 Dell Latitudes all on 2.4Ghz sounds high. Have you thought of using 5Ghz band. E.g my laptop trolley of 30 has one 7962 and the laptops are 50/50 split 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz and works fine. Bit of a pain to get our Wi-Fi configurations script to split the two groups but once done you see the difference.

[Homeland]

It may sound high but the current 2.4ghz hybrid solution handles it fine and costs less than £1500 for 25 AP's, my thought was by putting in Ruckus it would be even better but the initial test from Net Ctrl did not provide what was expected and I was extremely disappointed. As for spreading the laptops over both ranges I do understand what your saying and will have to have a look to see if they are capable of running at 5ghz but im sure they only run at 2.4ghz, and as they have only just been bought I don't think they would approve asking for them to be replaced again. Edited May 11, 2013 by Homeland

[Homeland]

Just had a check and this is the wireless card I recently purchased for the laptops;

 

Atheros 5418 AR5008 AR5BXB72 Wifi Mini-PCI 802.11ABGN 300M

 

As in the description it clearly states A,B,G and N and as A is only 5Ghz it must support that range so here’s hoping when the equipment arrives on Monday.

[synaesthesia]

Atheros..... they were always the failiest of fail when Toshiba's used them and could barely be made to work on WPA2 despite supporting it. They are junk However the original Dell ones would have either been Intel or Broadcom and shouldn't have had an issue.

 

Might be worth trying one of the original cards and rolling back to WEP on the points (just as a test, don't do that permanently obviously!)

[Homeland]

were using WPA 2 at the moment and they seem to be working fine, it was the original cards that were pathetic.

[synaesthesia]

I mean just as a check to help diagnose faults. What model Latitudes are they out of interest, and running what OS?

 

Perhaps throw a bootable Ubuntu livecd in and see if the problem occurs there to help narrow down to OS/Drivers or hardware compatibility.

 

Simple checks before going all in with Ruckus changes - as in, is it the same whether 1 or 30 of the machine are connecting?

[Homeland]

Latitude d531's running windows 7

[Homeland]

OK am I missing something guys, I have checked the laptops with the new cards in that say they do a\b\g\n so a is 5ghz but I am only getting speeds of 130Mbps not 300Mbps. Is there a way of forcing it to use n I have checked the properties of the adaptor but there is nothing there to force it to use N ???

[localzuk]

OK am I missing something guys, I have checked the laptops with the new cards in that say they do a\b\g\n so a is 5ghz but I am only getting speeds of 130Mbps not 300Mbps. Is there a way of forcing it to use n I have checked the properties of the adaptor but there is nothing there to force it to use N ???

 

You will never get 300Mbps - it is a theoretical maximum, not a real maximum. 130Mbps for an n connection is good.

[ConradJones]

You will never get 300Mbps - it is a theoretical maximum, not a real maximum. 130Mbps for an n connection is good.

 

Thats right

[m25man]

 

In order to get 300Mbps you need to use 40Mhz Channel bonding which means setting your AP's to 40Mhz only channels and both the client and AP must support it exclusively at which point nothing else can get a look in.

Dual band adapters and APs that support Dual Band/Dual Radio concurrent use can get 600Mbps and AC 800Mbps+

 

As stated 130Mbps is good going for an N radio whilst maintaining compatibility for legacy clients but if you want to play and your adapters support it try setting everything to 40Mhz and monitor the airwaves with a spectrum monitor, your neighbours will love you... mine do

 

300 Mpbs is wireless speed by the time you take into account the encryption and other overheads 180Mbs equivalent wire speed (FD) is about the best you can expect.

[Homeland]

Thank Guys, I will connect to the ZD later and change the channel then tomorrow when I get in see what the laptops do, any increase can only be a positive.

[funkymunky]

Atheros..... they were always the failiest of fail when Toshiba's used them and could barely be made to work on WPA2 despite supporting it. They are junk However the original Dell ones would have either been Intel or Broadcom and shouldn't have had an issue.

 

Might be worth trying one of the original cards and rolling back to WEP on the points (just as a test, don't do that permanently obviously!)

 

Ruckus APs use Atheros silicon (as do Aruba and some (all?) Ubiquiti). A lot of the time things like that are driver issues rather than the silicon being fundamentally broken (that's not saying they've not released crap in the past, they may have).

[ConradJones]

Atheros..... they were always the failiest of fail when Toshiba's used them and could barely be made to work on WPA2 despite supporting it.

 

For WEP Cracking theres a few models that are pretty useful. though

[Homeland]

Going to try again this morning, forced the ZD last night to channel 40 and all the ipads are connecting fine, will try the laptops with upgraded cards in a min and see if they connect at g\n or a\n. On first glance though I do still seem to have an issue with the older laptops running at b\g.

[witch]

What do @Net-Ctrl say about your problems?

[Homeland]

Never got it throught them got the evaluation equipment through CP-LTD not spoke to them yet as I only got everything set up around 4pm yesterday so this is the first proper day looking at it.

[chazzy2501]

laptops running Windows use a LOT more traffic than ipads. Ruckus have great airtime fairness but it is still a share of the total available bandwidth.

 

Using 2.4GHz then channel bonding is nearly impossible in an environment that has to deal with ANY other WIFI. Bonding will only occur when there are two adjacent channels with no other APs using that channel and also ANY client not capable of channel bonding is in range. (the AP will un-bond automatically)

[Homeland]

Well todays test could not have gone any better,

 

The only room I could find to spread the laptops out was the KS2 hall so I spread the laptops all over the hall and setup one of the Ruckus 7982 AP’s, whilst monitoring the ZD I could see that all laptops were connecting at 5Ghz and maintaining a constant 130Mbps.

 

We logged on and streamed a combination of an 800Mb Avi file and a 4Gb Mkv file with no issues whatsoever other than laptop batteries fialing.

 

Could not be more pleased and a great start to the evaluation.

[Haptic]

Could not be more pleased and a great start to the evaluation.

 

Superb news, we're glad it's all running smoothly

(note we'd kept schtum until now!)

[Homeland]

You will never get 300Mbps - it is a theoretical maximum, not a real maximum. 130Mbps for an n connection is good.

 

Can I just say after messing about this afternoon and rolling back wireless card drivers I decided to let Windows 7 install the drivers itself, then set up 15 of the laptops in the hall again and they all reached and sat at 300Mbps, the speed was fantastic.

[synaesthesia]

Ruckus APs use Atheros silicon (as do Aruba and some (all?) Ubiquiti). A lot of the time things like that are driver issues rather than the silicon being fundamentally broken (that's not saying they've not released crap in the past, they may have).

 

 

Really? Things must have changed then! (the atheros issues were very much prevailant during the shift from WEP to WPA2). Drivers didn't help much back then W7 seemed to stop all those thankfully