Extreme Networks

Matt4 · ‎04-16-2018

Just after the first of the year I updated all (59) of my AP250’s from 7.0r2 to 8.1r2. It was a major struggle getting all the AP’s updated, which should have tipped me off to stop but I powered through. In the days following we had numerous reports of tenants having wifi issues. The main issue we had was a user would be connected working perfectly then suddenly, with device still connected, they could not access anything on the internet, then a suddenly as it quit it began working again.

There were also issues with the Hive being unresponsive, reporting incorrect data from AP’s, turning on bonjour gateway in the delta when it was turned off (this was only in the delta, a complete config would have it off). I worked extensively with tier 3 support, we downgraded firmware, upgraded graded firmware, meticulously combed through the network profile making some tweaks to the radio profiles, data rates, QoS, and firewall settings. We rebalances 2.4GHz radios to fix some interference issues. Nothing seemed to help the issues. After almost three months of working with support and getting nowhere I decided to roll back to 7.0r2 and, knock on wood, things have been running smoothly again.

I should mention that our environment is a little unique. We are an off-campus student housing building, so basically apartments. We offer our tenants “free” wifi, so all of the devices on the network are BYOD, which we have no control over. I should also mention that the main issues was sporadic, one tenant would have an issue while their friend sitting right next to them would be working perfectly fine. We had reports of issues from all device types, iPhone’s, android phones, macs, windows pc’s, rokus, apple tvs, fire sticks.

All of that to ask. Has anyone else had issues with HiveOS 8 versions?

nlowe · ‎04-18-2018

Hi Matthew,

I work in the UK Tier 3 team at Aerohive, one of a couple of people who handle support escalations in the EMEA/APAC regions with Aerohive's engineering.

We are aware of one behavioural difference present in HiveOS 8.2r1a and HiveOS 8.3r2 and not HiveOS 7.x whereby a dynamic OFDM sensitivity threshold now present, used to decide whether to demodulate or not for RX, can cause issues with some stations where their transmission is received at low power.

The impact is that you may observe things like RTS/CTS not taking place where this is received below the dynamic threshold, with sticky clients at the edge of a cell this can be challenging.

This threshold is inevitably a tradeoff of various factors to ensure the best airtime efficiency but we are looking to see if this logic can be enhanced to better mitigate this side effect.

Symptomatically, this can match what you have described.

In HiveOS 8.2r1a and 8.3r2 as far as CFDs go:

CFD-2973 is unlikely to be related as it pertains to an explicit rejection of auth/assoc with some clients. This was not an intermittent issue and was an interoperability concern.

CFD-2973 pertains to an interoperability issue in high density setups where there are a mix of legacy 802.11b CCK and 802.11n OFDM rates for the basic rates. The fix constrains the management frame behaviour so that only the CCK rates are used.

CFD-3076 made changes to the CCA threshold, setting it more appropriately according to the region configured as opposed to the same value across all regions. This can improve connectivity in noisy, interference prone environments.

CFD-3039 resolved a TX queuing issue where the radio was switching between servicing clients and performing background scanning. This could cause packet loss with some clients.

Please do test with 8.3r2 where possible or 8.2r1a otherwise.

Thanks,

Nick

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Matt4 · ‎04-18-2018

Can you also engage the right people to get firmware issues fixed?

Support did have me upgrade to 8.2 and we still had issues. I see that 8.3 is available but I cannot seem to find the release notes for it.

nlowe · ‎04-18-2018

Hi Nick,

I will engage the right people to get that documentation corrected to state 12.8.0.3 rather than 12.8.0.8.

Thanks for highlighting this.

You can use 8.2r1a and 8.3r2 with the latest release of the HMNG VA.

Regards,

Nick

nick_nauwelaert · ‎04-18-2018

excellent, thx for the heads up. kinda a bummer that the on-prem hivemanager ng has been upgraded to 12.8.0.3 while 8.2r1a requires 12.8.0.8.

// nick

AnonymousM · ‎04-18-2018

Most release notes should now be located here - http://docs.aerohive.com/330000/docs/help/english/ng/Content/reference/docs/docs.htm

nick_nauwelaert · ‎04-18-2018

sounds familiar. 8.0 & 8.1 are also giving us random disconnects for no apparent reason. it seems 8.2 might have worked out all the kinks, but then we first need to upgrade our on-prem hivemanager-ng to the version released 2 days ago.

as a side note, where did the hiveos release notes go?

// nick

Extreme Networks

Issues with AP250 and HiveOS 8.1r2?

Issues with AP250 and HiveOS 8.1r2?