D-Link Wireless Access Points For Business > DAP-2695

DAP-2695 Spontaneous Reboots

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prettybird:
Earlier this week I upgraded my office's network of 5 Asus RT-AC68U's running in Access Point mode. Frankly, the old system had been working flawlessly. Whatever black magic was happening under the hood allowed roaming between AP's to be utterly seamless, rarely dropping even a single ping as I was testing. The same was essentially true for an older network of similarly configured Buffalo WZR-600DHP's.

But since I was having latency issues with our new exterior WiFi security cams, I figured it was a good excuse "upgrade" to a more legit business class solution. After some research I went ahead and bought four DAP-2695's for our almost all-Mac office in the US. One AP is set up as the master, one as the backup master, and two slaves in an AP array on the same subnet dedicated to WiFi.

- All are on the latest 1.17 firmware
- One SSID, secured with WPA Personal, for all AP's and bands
- Band Steering enabled with default values
- Channels are set to "auto" for each
- Auto-RF is enabled for the AP Array
    - Auto-Initiate Period: 24 hours
    - RSSI threshold: 40%
    - RF Report Frequency: 10 seconds
- RSSI "aging out" threshold enabled at 70%
- ACL RSSI enabled at 80%
- Beacon Interval changed to 40ms

All other settings remain default.

It has been nothing but headaches as I've tried to get these things to work, and even at their best they seem to be a huge step backward in every way beside their range and throughput, which is fantastic.

I'm hoping you can help me resolve some of these problems, or they are going right back to the seller.

1)  I can't get them to stay alive more than a day, at best. And since the logs are stored in volatile memory, I have no idea what the hell is going on when they do go down. Every connected user is kicked offline, and sometimes they can't re-associate with another AP for a long while, or at all. They're sometimes down for minutes, disconnecting network drives, kicking them off chat, and interrupting their work at random points throughout the day. I can't seem to anticipate or reproduce these reboots, and I don't know what might be causing them. They seem completely random.

2)  After moving through the office and aging out an old connection, there is often a significant delay of up to 45 seconds as the client is dropped and connects to a closer AP. Sometimes it's a lot faster, but it isn't consistent. Is there any way this can be optimized, or is this expected behavior with these units? If so, they will likely not work as a permanent solution.

2)  I don't know if this is relevant, but I cannot get the NTP settings to work or to stick. After these aggravating reboots the system time for the AP is always 1970. I've tried my office router's NTP server and a number of publicly available NTP servers, but none seem to work. Again, I'm not even sure if this causes any problems, but it doesn't say much for the stability of these units.

Thanks for taking a look at this. Any advice would be appreciated.

FurryNutz:
Link>Welcome!


* What region are you located?
* Try setting a manual Channel to a open or unused channel. 1, 6 or 11. 11 for single mode N if the channel is clear. 13 for EU regions. Try channel 48 or 149 on 5Ghz.
* Any 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz cordless house phones or WiFi APs near by that maybe causing interferences?
* Any other WiFi routers in the area that maybe causing interferences? Link> Use a WiFi Scanner to find out. How many?
* If you have any of these options, Try turning OFF or ON Short GI, WLAN Partition, Extra Wireless Protection and HT 20/40 Co-existence if you have it. Also testing with HT20/40Mhz Co-existence enabled will impact results as well. I prefer to use this option OFF. Recommended settings are default. Under Advanced/Advanced Wireless.
What is the distance between each DAP?

Might try using just one or two DAPs and see if they continue to disconnect as a test.

Might try more recent FW updates and see:
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=66358.0

prettybird:
Thanks for the response.

As I mentioned, I am in the US, and our office has a fair bit of interference in the 2.4GHz range. We're a large open-air office, and the 4 AP's are in each corner and situated about 100' from each other at the closest. Could such a (relatively) close proximity be an issue? There are quite a few freestanding structures throughout the office as well (some metal), so multiple locations have been necessary in the past for total coverage.

Are there any good reasons for why these things would simply power down like they've been doing? Even if it's an interference issue, why the reboots? It's beyond aggravating, and it leaves no hint as to why it happened. Just five minutes ago our "master" AP went down a few times in a row, nuking the connections of everyone in the office off and on for about 10 minutes.

1.17 was the latest firmware according to the official site, as far as I could tell. I tracked down the one you linked and will give it a shot.

FurryNutz:
If you have a lot of congestion in your are due to other wifi neighbors, and leaving the DAPs on Auto Channel Scan will cause these disconnects as I presume they are encountering possible interference on channels being used and may not be able to find a clear channel to use.

I would have a look at the channel usage and see which channel is least used, 1, 6 or 11.
Also something that may help, if the DAPs have any power output levels, change this from HIgh to Medium or Low and test.

I put in a direct link to the FW at the Canada site.

prettybird:
Thank you, I found the firmware earlier through Google -> Softpedia. The one on the Canada site seems identical.

Upgrades are done, so hopefully that helps things. No drops as of yet.

As for the reboots, I understand that interference can cause drops, but we're talking about hardware reboots here, as in the AP's are powering down entirely, ungracefully, and causing their clients to stall out and not reconnect elsewhere. It's a mess. I would think that it's faulty hardware, but it's happening to all four of our DAP-2695's at one point or another. What could explain that?

I'll try setting the channels manually. The "Channel Analyze" function is definitely helpful for this.

What about those other two issues? Non-functional NTP settings and super long AP handoffs? It's still weirding me out seeing 1970 as the system year, and walking from one room to another is still a roll of the dice even when the AP's are behaving.

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