Monday, October 25, 2010

New H-REAP 'feature' in WLC 7.0 code

This just in from:

When a Hybrid REAP access point enters into a standalone mode, the following occurs:

The access point checks whether it is able to reach the default gateway via ARP. If so, it will continue to try and reach the controller.

If the access point fails to establish the ARP, the following will occur.

The access point attempts to discover for five times and if it still cannot find the controller, it tries to renew the DHCP on the ethernet interface to get a new DHCP IP.

The access point will retry for five times, and if that fails, the access point will renew the IP address of the interface again, this will happen for three attempts.

If the three attemps fail, the access point will fall back to the static IP and will reboot (only if the access point is configured with a static IP).

Reboot is done to remove the possibility of any unknown error the access point configuration.

Once the access point reestablishes a connection with the controller, it disassociates all clients, applies new configuration information from the controller, and reallows client connectivity.


This means no more site surveys with lightweight Access Points running in H-REAP mode since there is no pingable default gateway. AC UPS to power a POE switch? Too bulky and hard to travel with in my book! Looks like we'll be reverting to a 'best guess' survey till some Autonomous code surfaces…

2 comments:

  1. Sam, why would you survey in lightwight mode? Why not use the same model access point in autonomous mode ? The radio and RF behavior doesnt change ...

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  2. George, Great question! The only reason you'd do this is if Autonomous code wasn't available for your Access Point. This happened at the 1140 launch and now for the 1040s, 1262s and 3502s.

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