Extricom issues possibly IP address?

[columbiers]

Hi, Hoping someone can help with this!

 

We have an Extricom ESXW 2400 switch, with 16 AP's around the school- primary school, old victorian building, thick walls. Around 70 laptops connecting via wireless plus 25 desktops wired in. Not often all at once though. We run a RM CC4 network, but around half the machines are standalones due to the insanely long log in times for the CC4 machines. Mix of XP and windows 7, OS doesn't make any difference to the problem.

 

The problem is often laptops cannot get onto the network- they 'see' the wireless ESSID but cannot fully connect- no internet access at all, litte yellow ! on the wireless symbol. The XP machines report that the network isn't giving them an IP address. Often 25-30 are connecting via a single AP. I'm told this should be fine using the Extricom system.

 

The only solution that works is to pull the plug on the Extricom switch and then plug it back in. This usually works and laptops can access the internet once it's rebooted.

 

On avergae it needs rebooting once a day. So much so that my first task every morning is to reboot the switch in the hope that that will keep it going until lunch at least. Wired machines are rock solid and never have any connectivity issues.

 

Only just taken over but apparently it's always been like this!

Any suggestions please- is there anything I can configure on the switch that will solve this?

[m25man]

I would look very carefully at your WPA/WPA2 settings and/or AES/TKIP preferences.

 

You need to establish which combination best suits your OS version, NIC drivers and Extricon Firmware.

 

The safest and fastest solution is WPA2 with AES however not all NIC's have drivers to support it and the AP's that have the ability to work in mixed modes WPA/WPA2 can simply confuse a client during the association phase.

 

Without the right tools this can be very difficult to diagnose, logs on the Extricom and Clients should reveal all.

Normally Updating the Extricom to the latest firmware set the security to WPA2 and AES and updating all of the clients drivers and/or firmware will sort it all out but the hardest part is finding which part of this chain is really to blame!

 

There are still a lot of devices out there that cannot support WPA2 so you may be forced to fall back for compatability purposes.

 

I would strongly advise that you test with no security enabled just to confirm that the connectivity issues are resolved, then come back to setting up WPA again.