Peculiar unifi wireless issue

[Tys]

Hi all,

 

Hoping someone will spot something obvious that I've missed here!

 

We are having a really rather strange issue with our unifi U6-LR access points and intermittent client connectivity. They have always been a little flaky (clients would often have to manually disconnect and reconnect when roaming between APs) however at some point in the last few weeks they have gotten worse and are now essentially unusable. Not something we really wanted to discover in the last week of the hols!

 

The state of play currently is that the majority of clients that connect have a very unreliable connection. They stay associated to the SSID however pings show normal responses about 20% of the time and "general failure" the other 80%. It doesn't affect all clients at the same time and seems totally random.

 

So far I have tried:

 

• Downgrading and upgrading various firmware levels
  
• Proved it is not AP specific (disabled POE to all APs and then tested several individually)
  
• Proved it is not switchport or switch specific, tried various different switch firmware too just for completeness
  
• Static IP on the client (no difference)
  
• Splitting 2.4ghz and 5ghz (issue exists on both SSIDs)
  
• Manually setting channels rather than auto
  
• Manually setting power levels for each radio instead of auto
  
• Disabling wireless uplink functionality
  
• Recreating SSID
  
• Experimented with options on SSID page - none of them (bss, min data rate, band steering etc) made a difference.
  
• Restarted all switches and APs
  
• Disabling spanning tree - both at port level for the AP being tested and across the estate - ports don't go into STP block anyway, but ruled it out
  
• Upgraded wifi drivers on clients - various different devices, manufacturers and ages affected but ruled out anyway
  
• Tried WPA2 vs WPA3, no difference (no RADIUS or anything special in use)
  

 

Wired clients are fine. And oddly some wireless clients seem fine - our iPad for sign in app, for example has no issues. Other sources of wifi like my mobile hotspot are fine so I don't think it likely to be interference.

 

Any suggestions greatly appreciated We have a load of old Ruckus APs that could go back in temporarily worst case but hoping to avoid that. These U6-LR were purchased last year before I arrived so as much as I'd like to put something more enterprise grade in, budget says no! This particular AP model doesn't appear to have the best firmware release cadence either which is also not helping.

[rogerdnixon]

What version of the firmware are you on? 6.5.64 is the latest and we are running it without any issues.

 

In the past I've seen issues with specific Windows devices with certain wifi cards in the - mainly Realtek one and in some case I just swapped them out for Intel AX200's and the issue vanished. Reverting to some older Microsoft drivers can also help.

 

However, this was all when the U6-LR (I normally deploy the U6-Pro now which is a great AP) was first out. Since the more recent firmware update I've not seen any issues.

 

Some general config points:

 

I'd leave 5Ghz at 20 or 40Mhz not higher.

Turn off wireless messing unless you are actually using it

I'd turn off band steering as outside of specific use cases it can cause more problems than it solves

I typically leave things like channel and power setting on auto - but they can be tweaked manually is specific use cases

 

As some clients connect fine - then its likely an issue client side - rubbish network adaptor or maybe one of the config settings above. Good luck!

[Mr.Ben]

What switches are you using?

 

I've only ever seen this sort of issue where a mac address table isn't updating, so when you roam traffic is routed back to the 'old' AP.

 

Specifically for us it was Procurve/Aruba switches and Unifi APs. A firmware update for the switch fixed it.

[chazzy2501]

I updated one of my wireless networks in Unifi to enable all the modern features like PMF, fast roaming, proxy arp, bss transition and others. MOST laptops were fine but some became really poor and very unreliable... The oddity is that I buy my laptops 20 or 30 at a time and I couldn't pin it down to any particular driver or hardware device... My feeling is that there were a few marginal devices that pooed the bed when I enabled these options but were fine before. All the laptops were 10th gen intel

[geohanson]

Did you ever get to the bottom of this?

We're having lots of similar issues with U6 Pro APs, but all our AC-HD and NanoHDs are working perfectly.

[1TF0rward]

Having the same messages but no known issues for clients. We have just upgraded to U6 APs but have 2 UAP-AC-PRO in an external building that works fine. Our switches are old so thought that might have been related.

[Alastairb25]

Possibly power, we had issues with U6 and found our Cisco switches did not power them correctly, using the POE injectors that came with them seemed to fix it

[1TF0rward]

Possibly power, we had issues with U6 and found our Cisco switches did not power them correctly, using the POE injectors that came with them seemed to fix it

This could well be the issue. The two in the external building are being powered by a Unifi switch!

[Alastairb25]

This could well be the issue. The two in the external building are being powered by a Unifi switch!

 

From memory it powered them enough that they would light up, but then would not adopt them from the console

Worked straight away with an injector

[Oaktech]

We had a similar issue. We turned off BSS transition and fast roaming, updated everything to latest, forgot all clients and restarted whole estate and the problems have not re-occurred.