Aerohive Wireless

[JBoyd]

When the school wanted me to install a wireless network I checked out 4 or 5 companies and eventually settled on Aerohive having seen it working in a local school. To be fair it was a close call between it and Ruckus after testing. That was 3 years ago and it has been such a nightmare (For us anyway) and our installers, AIT, do not seem to be able to make it work reliably. I have asked them if our network set up is any different to other schools because I cannot think that they would also put up with such shenannigans. We have two SSIDs Guest and School Portal, the Guest is accessed using a PSK which is renewed weekly and bypasses our filters so people visiting the school can use the wi-fi. All AD users connect through the School Portal and we have two groups, Staff and Students, on two different WLANs that use different DHCP scopes.

 

We have problems with roaming connections not being passed on and users being disconnected at any time even though the DHCP licence expiry time is set quite high (8 hours). Users are also being issued licences from the wrong DHCP scope or pickling one up from one scope and being re-allocated another when they log on to the wireless (Which means the previous licence is held until its expiry. I admit I was sceptical about wireless but thought I had made the correct decision given my reservations, but the wireless is a bit of a running joke in the school and we cannot expand our BYOD plans till it is reliable.

 

So if anyone would be willing to discuss this with me or chat about their school set up post here and I will respond.

[nikaso]

I went through a similar process in a similar time frame to yourself, I don't actually think we considered Aerohive at the time, it was between Meraki, Ruckus and HP (I think). There were some concerns at the time with Ruckus not working in a school we knew about and HP just didn't seem particularly interested whereas we were impressed with Meraki. It's largely been a good experience since then with Meraki, the cloud management is easy but still fully featured and the only issues we have had seem to be due to some dodgy PoE injectors we used. They aren't cheap but we haven't seen any of the DHCP problems you mention.

 

In terms of setup we have three SSIDs, a School WiFi, a Student WiFi and our Radius SSID which authenticated school devices connect to. All wireless devices get assigned an address from the same DHCP scope (which is different to wired devices). To be fair we don't have many staff or students who need to roam with wireless devices but certainly as far as smart phones and tablets go they have no difficulty handing off to other APs as you move around school.

 

Does Aerohive use a similar licences scheme to Meraki? We pay for a 3 year licence per device and will need to renew this otherwise we can't use the APs, I think it's roughly £110 per device. Obviously we had to buy the APs initially as well.

[foofighterjim]

I have Aerohive here but still on a very basic flat network until the summer. I have not had any issues with roaming devices on our AP121 and AP230's. What model APs do you have and are you using HMOL?

[apeman]

This sounds a bit like an issue we had with aerohive and was fixed in the latest firmware that came out 3 weeks ago, are you running the latest??

@nikaso just for info Aerohive and Meraki hardware was identical in the older models but neither company will admit it.

[nikaso]

That's interesting to know, I have tried the latest cloud managed aerohive cloud management and didn't rate it compared to the Meraki interface so probably won't look to change going forward.

[nicklowe]

This will almost certainly be an issue with your configuration and nothing to do with bugs/issues in HiveOS, Aerohive's firmware.

 

Which model(s) of AP do you have deployed?

 

It is bad practice to use a CWP as you are doing. Have you considered using PPSKs or 802.1X for your staff/students?

 

I would be very happy to help you get things working if you ping me via a PM.

 

Have you also considered seeing if it is possible to transfer your support from AIT to a company like LAN3?

Edited February 12, 2015 by nicklowe

[bossman]

@nicklowe

 

+1 for LAN3

 

Excellent company with fantastic service

[JBoyd]

Thanks for your comments and advice we have had two technicians in to take a look and survey the network from which some useful info has been gathered. I should reply to the comment about LAN3, who I am sure are a good company by saying that AIT have given us every assistance to try to resolve the problems and continue to do so. I am sure we on the final furlong.