Fortinet FortiAP 231G Connected Classroom problems

[bewlay51]

Hi All,

Over the summer holidays we had all our UnFi Wi-Fi taken out and replaced with a Fortinet system based around FortiAP 231G. Lots of new cabling went in along with new switches and fibre links.

 

Since then the Wi-Fi has been a nightmare. Here are some of the problems....

 

• Weak signals even though the school is now littered with AP's
  
• Device clinging onto to AP's and not letting go.
  
• A user can't connect to the wireless in the classroom, even though there is an AP in the room. They walk out of the room, a few meters up the corridor and they connect. They walks back into the room and the device disconnects. This happens in a number of different rooms.
  
• Devices dropping off the network, then reconnecting or saying signal is weak.
  

 

 

£50K+ worth of kit. The Unfi cost me about £2K to put in and it just worked.

 

Has anyone ease has issues with the FortiAP 231G or know if there is a software or firmware problem with them?

 

Thanks

John

[Alastairb25]

Interesting.

 

We use Unifi, mixture of 6LR, NanoHD and normal LR

We have pondered replacing, but the Juniper system we where quoted for would have easily been £100k never mind license costs

 

Unifi is not perfect, but we came to the thinking that a lot of issues are things we cannot control :-

 

Metal shelves

Excess devices, eg Students with phones, watches etc all in same room, seen one AP with over 100 devices on as an example

Microwaves

 

and so forth

 

We are going to stick with Unifi, on the basis that we could spend and get a more commercial grade system then find it makes no difference

 

 

Thanks,

Alastair

[TronXP]

Hi,

 

I will be converting one of our buildings from Unifi to Forti 431's so it is disappointing to hear about your experience.

 

Quick questions though, do you run these AP's off a local Fortigate or FortiLAN cloud?

 

Did you have WiFi survey done before and after installation?

 

have you brought it up with the installers as it could just be misconfiguration?

[bewlay51]

Hi - Thanks for the reply - site survey was done by the installer who have a lot of experance with Fortinet produces. Everything managed locally onsite. We do have access to Forticloud to register products etc.

 

They did let slip that they have never used FortiAP 231G's before and we kind of agreed that the issue was possibly firmware or software. It's very odd. Some devices can't even connect to the AP's in their room, but wonder down the corridor they connect then seem to stick to that AP, once out of range, they disconnect and wont connect again until you go back to the AP that they were able to connect to.

 

Problem is across a range of devices and the installed witness the issue first handing when on site with their own equipment.

 

By the way - I've heard from another school they are having similar issues.

 

I have to say the installer has done everything they can to fix the issue and will be back on site during the nest holiday.

[psydii]

It’s 2023, how can this be a thing. If the vendor does not know how to configure them, perhaps they misrepresented their competency when tendering for the contract.

 

Do fortinet have a design guide? Has it been followed? If there is variance between the guide and “as deployed”, is the documentation explaining this?

 

Has Fortinet support been engaged?

 

My guess would be around standards based roaming vs proprietary systems vs age and diversity of the clients.

[mavhc]

1. Hardware problems

Are all the APs showing in whatever dashboard you have, are they all showing they have enough power?

Have you tested the new cabling?

 

2. Software problems

Seems like the roaming settings may be incorrect, what are the current settings?

 

Do you know if using 2.4GHz vs 5GHz makes any difference?

[commtechitltd]

I have had a client school have the same kit installed over the summer replacing some Cisco Kit that had been rock solid for years, the upgrade to the Forti kit was done under the CTC Scheme, we had exactly the same issues as you describe where that kit wouldn't connect in the classrooms where the AP's were but only for some classrooms, go into the next classroom and they connected straight away.

 

Together with the installer we worked out that disabling the 5G Radio allowed the devices to connect, but when 5G was enabled they wouldn't connect. Firmware upgrade to 7.4 on all the AP's and Fortigate Controller seemed to resolve the issue, but not after a lot of back and forth between us, installer and Fortinet.

 

However a different issue still remains in that a Wireless Bridge to a remote building keeps going down without any explaination - issue still being investigated

[bewlay51]

Thank you for all your comments - we thought the installers had it cracked with the latest firmware update and some extra tweaking - but on Friday I had a couple of laptops not connecting, but were ok it the user left the room and walked up the corridor. Another laptop with no wireless and 4 or 5 Chromebooks not able to connect.

 

We still have issues - the installed was done during the last summer holiday.

[PotNoodleTech]

It does sound like a firmware/config issue given it's site wide.

 

But also - what switches are you running - it's not something do do with PoE classifications is it i.e an older switch not being able to power the new fangled POE++ devices properly?

 

Ours was upgraded by the LEA from our old Cisco 1142 to new Aruba and to be honest there really isn't any difference that I can see - everything seems the same speed/seems to work the same? Gotta wonder if the cost was worth it.

[mavhc]

Given that a) if your computers are old they won't have new wifi, and b) 99% of everything seems to be accessing the internet, then no, new wifi won't make things faster.

 

I installed Cambium XV2 APs, dunno if it's faster, but it's more reliable then the 15 year old Cisco

[speakercon]

I had a similarly bad experience with Fortinet wifi quite a few years ago, same issues you describe and sounds like its no better 5 years later.

 

My take was it was all to do with the firmware (although there was also quite a high hardware failure rate). My only advise would be to keep trying the new firmware updates until you find one that works(ish) and then don't touch it.

 

Or if poss try and get it all ripped out as it was nothing but problems until the day it was removed.

[Michael]

I'm just speculating here, but I'm guessing your existing Ubiquiti kit was to WiFi 5 or AC standard, whereas when I look at the Fortinet 231G I notice it supports WiFi 6 or AX standard.

 

I'd be tempted to deliberately disable AX for now on the controller, as few devices support the standard. I'd also set the security level to WPA2 rather than WPA2/WPA3 mixed, if this is currently set.

[biggjb]

Im guessing your network is swamped with AP's Try disconnecting some reducing the potential channel conflict. Some else has also mentioned you need to make sure there is enough power to the Access points. Finally are the points in the classrooms or corridors. If in the corridors it wont work properly. DM if it helps

[psydii]

I'm guessing your network is swamped with AP's Try disconnecting some reducing the potential channel conflict. Some else has also mentioned you need to make sure there is enough power to the Access points. Finally are the points in the classrooms or corridors. If in the corridors it wont work properly. DM if it helps

 

I'd hope with govt money behind the project an RF Survey was done and AP deployment designed using that information.

 

 

Something I have noticed is that from time to time updates / new hardware causes weird issues, and then everything needs to be updated (Bios/Firmware/OS/Drivers on all devices and APs) to restore stability.

 

Also when tendering for our WLAN 5 years ago, I testing showed the ac 4x4 APs were a league ahead of 2x2 and 3x3 APs for the client mix we had. The equivalent tier APs today only support ac clients at 2x2 - which would be a significant downgrade for a significant quantity of devices. Also I am very unclear whether ac clients force ax APs into ac mode or whether an AP can serve multiple ac/ax clients at their respective full speeds 'at the same time'.

 

If fear the former, and thus ax APs might actually be worse if your end users' devices are old.

 

FWIW IP/DHCP/DNS issues on our WLAN have been resolved with either AP reboots (one or two APs on a three/six months cadence seem to just go weird), or firmware/driver updates on the clients (happens most often with new models, after a few driver/firmware releases they stabilise).

 

The suggestion above to 'turn off' ax features and force everything to ac seems like a reasonable troubleshooting step to me, and a fairly easy one to execute.

[synaesthesia]

May be some difference in expectation between older AP's and new ones - modern wifi 6 is generally down to 1 AP per 1 or 2 rooms depending on the makeup of the rooms, walls and ceilings. One of our older Unifi AC Pro covers 5 times the area of one of our newer Unifi 6 models. Nearly all CtC funded programs are 1 AP per classroom.

[TronXP]

I have now received some 231G's and have started to do some testing before we deploy them. I am using a Fortigate to control them. At first, everything was connecting fine to them, but as described above, clients liked to hold on too long. I resolved this using the "Sticky client" option. You can access this via CLI or you can access it via GUI if you enable advanced wireless in the "feature visibility" in the system menu.

 

It all seemed to be going smoothly until I decided to test different security mode settings WPA2 WPA3 etc. Once I changed that some devices wouldn't connect and some would. Even when I changed it back to what I had originally set for the testing it still was not working correctly. In the end, I deleted all the SSiD's and recreated them and everything has come back up and working.

 

I am not going to touch anything rest of today and tomorrow and see if things keep working as expected. Next week We will begin testing with Class sets of Chrombooks doing various tasks, video streaming, Google meets to see how they compare to our unifi system.

[mavhc]

Which devices wouldn't connect? Any pattern?

[TronXP]

We were testing, Chromebooks, Phones and tablets, basically one device of each type we have in the school. Chromebooks\tablets would not connect at all, some of the phones would connect if they had been connected before the security changes. As I said I am going to not touch it for the rest of the day/tomorrow and see if my fix was temporary.

[psydii]

I'm getting flashbacks to Meru.

[bewlay51]

Hi all,

Quick update on my original post.

 

After a number of firmware updates and tweaks the issues seems to have been fixed. I have to say a big thank you to the supplier for their hard work getting to the bottom of the issues we had. It turns out firmware that was the root cause.

[PotNoodleTech]

It's good that you got there and even gooder that they sorted it and fixed the firmware!!

[mavhc]

Bad that their firmware is mostly broken, don't they have test suites?

[PotNoodleTech]

Bad that their firmware is mostly broken, don't they have test suites?

 

No different to aruba or unifi or anyone else TBH?