Extreme recommendation for AP reboots? Best practice?

[David_Nelson]

Is there a recommendation from Extreme on how often, if ever, to reboot AP's for maintenance?

On the controller I see the options under "AP Maintenance Cycle" with the minimum reboot frequency of one month. So should this generally be configured to run a monthly reboot. Are there from your experience good reasons to do this, or should we just let them run.

We don't need to use this feature for firmware upgrades, since most of these are schools and we just do code update during breaks, and push them through manually.

Thank you for your input!
Have a great day!
David

[Joshua_Puusep]

I'm curious what Extreme has to say about this. Personally, I don't see a reason to reboot the AP's unless you are troubleshooting an active issue.

It's worth keeping in mind that rebooting the AP's will cause a channel scan and potentially change all the channels, unless you have them set manually.

[Hawkins__Bruce]

We typically recommend a static channel plan with ATPC and DCS turned off ... in which case ... a reboot should leave the APs coming back up to the same channel and power settings they were at prior to reboot.

Your point is a good one however for anyone that has ATPC and/or DCS enabled.

[Hawkins__Bruce]

Like any computing device ... it's never a bad idea to periodically reboot them to "refresh" them and any resources they have been using.

It kind of depends on your environment.

If you are a school system ... where most everyone goes home every single night and no one is there to use the WLAN between the hours of say ... 11pm to 5am or so ... it wouldn't be a bad idea to reboot them as often as every night.

If you are a hospital ... and have people needing access to the WLAN 24/7/365 ... you may not want to reboot your APs at all unless you are doing so as part of a code upgrade during a maintenance cycle or something.

We have APs that have been up and running for a year or more at some customer sites ... and they will tolerate it well given proper configuration and a good, stable code set ... but periodically rebooting in ways that your environment allows for ... is not a bad idea.

Hope this helps.