D-link wireless management problem

[swpmre]

Anyone use D-link DWS-3024 wireless management servers? Paired with DWL-3500AP access points?

 

We have a multiple site arrangement here. Each site with a specific IP address range. But all on the same subnet. The Wireless Management system should, assuming that the AP's have been configured correctly simply find them and add them to be managed.

 

At one of our sites, the AP's just aren't found. I've tried and tried again, double-triple checking the settings. I know that the rest of it is working, because I've gone to another site this afternoon and added an extra test AP just to prove it works.

 

Can't find anything unusual about this one site that might prevent me doing this work.

 

Anyone got any experience of D-link Wireless management in this sort of context? Would love to have a chat or some advice.

 

Thanks

 

Martin

[keithu]

Hi Martin

 

We're running the D-Link system here, with four DWS-3024s. All of our APs are on the same subnet with DHCP and I've had no problems with APs not being detected.

 

Could it be that the APs at your problem site are running a different firmware version? I can't think of anything else but I'm not sure I fully understand how you've got your system configured. Maybe you could explain it a bit more?

 

Keith

[swpmre]

Hi Keith,

 

I am not sure that it is a problem with the firmware - all our APs were bought at the same time. Though it is possible that earlier installed ones have downloaded a later version. I will check later.

 

Our setup is particularly complicated, requiring as it does, the sharing of a network infrastructe with the council. But our Adult Education centres are at a various remote sites. They each have a Cachepilot which acts as a DHCP server, we also have a centralised DNS server and file server. Each site has a unique IP address range (172.15.x.1 - 254).

 

I have asked the third party that maintains the infrastructure and the cachepilots to look into their setup to see if there is a difference between the setup at the problem site and the others. Apparently we also have manual routes setup for traffic between the cachepilots.

 

As an extra test, I've tried manually adding the IP address of the new AP (and I've tried a couple of spares too) at the new site, in the L3 discovery section of the D-link maintenance interface. But this rejects the IP address, saying it cannot add it. No idea what this means, and can't find an explanation anywhere online!

 

I am going to another site today to setup an AP there. If this works, I can only assume a network problem at this particular site. If it doesn't, then I must be doing stuff wrong with the D-link setup.

 

Many thanks for any further thoughts you might have,

 

Cheers

 

Martin

[keithu]

We're using L2 Discovery here so I'm not entirely familiar with the L3 setup, but if you're unable to add the AP's IP range in L3 Discovery I can't see how the switch would discover the AP as it needs to know what addresses to poll. I've just tried adding a range of addresses to one of our switches and didn''t get any error messages.

 

You also need to ensure there is a valid IP route betwen the controller switch and the APs. You can test this by going to 'LAN/Administration/Ping Test' and making sure you can ping your APs.

[swpmre]

Hi.

 

Found the problem which I'll post here for the benefit of anyone else who might search the forums for a similar problem.

 

If you're using the L3 search, you are limited to the number of IP addresses you can list. Because when we set up our first site, we similar put in the whole address range, adding extra IP addresses wasn't possible once we'd reach the maximum (I assume 254). The test site I used yesterday worked, because it was within the IP range we'd already entered.

 

Removing one of the IP addresses allows us to add a new IP.

 

If anyone else is using a similar D-link setup in school/college etc and wants to pool knowledge our share experiences in the future, please feel free to PM me.

 

Thanks for your help keith,

 

Cheers

 

Martin

[ful56_uk]

Hi guys

 

How do you find the performance on the dlink wireless system. We have it here and had it for a while but it seems to run like a dog drops wireless packets but our wired network is fine.

 

Be interested to hear your views