Article ID: 14662
Products
C20, C25, C4110, C5110, V2110; firmware 8.01.01.0251 and higher
Enterasys (formerly HiPath) Wireless Controllers (EWC)
Changes
Enabled LLDP on a managed Access Point (e.g. AP3610, AP3620), while SNMP is configured to 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller'.
Symptoms
If using the GUI, an "LLDP Confirmation" pop-up window appears:
enterasys LLDP COnfirmation
Secure Networks
WARNING: SNMP is set to publish Wireless AP as interface of controller.
Would you like to continue?
Cancel
[ ] Proceed (not recommended)
[ ] Disable SNMP publishing and proceed
[ OK ]If using the CLI, a variation of the same message appears in-line:
WARNING: SNMP is set to publish. How Do you wish to continue?
(C) Cancel
(P) Proceed
(O) Disable SNMP publishing and proceedCause
This query is trying to avoid having the NMS and/or other SNMP applications be confused by the simultaneous appearance of MAC addresses in two different network locations.
With APs published as interfaces of the controller and modeled as such in SNMP, in a walk of the Interfaces MIB there will be entries for each active AP. While an AP has LLDP enabled, it advertises its presence and MAC address to adjacent wired devices; and LLDP-enabled switches capture this information then expose it to the network manager through the LLDP MIBs. As a result if you simply turn on LLDP at the AP without disabling 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller', the AP's MAC is reported as attached to two different switch ports (potentially on two different subnets), which network managers may see and deem worthy of critical alerts.
Solution
Please make a selection based on the following:
- Cancel - Leave 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller' enabled but don't enable LLDP on the AP. This option has the advantage of being able to use MIB-2 rather than Enterasys proprietary MIBs to collect basic data about each AP.
- Proceed - Leave 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller' enabled and enable LLDP on the AP. For reasons mentioned above this is generally a bad idea, but is acceptable in some circumstances (e.g. not using a full network manager).
- Disable - Disable 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller' and leave LLDP enabled. AP statistics are still available through SNMP, but only via the proprietary wireless MIBs.
Functions as Designed (FAD).
With firmware 7.x and lower, there is no 'Publish APs as interfaces of the controller' configuration option so controller interfaces are always SNMP published.
