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mmartinez
03-21-2007, 02:26 PM
Hello -

We've been having problems with two sets of Aironet bridges where I work, and we've about run out of ideas.

we've got two 1300 series bridges that are line-of-sight to eachother over directional radio antenna. We've got another two 350s, also line-of-sight. These connections connect our users to our core switch and put them on a single network.

For weeks we've been having an intermittent problem. Occassionally the network on one of the offiste buildings connected by these bridges will become very slow and unresponsive. The network activity indicated by the port lights on the switches in these buildings will be frenetic (way more than normal activity and collisions). Once it starts happening our core switch will demonstrate the same behavior (although not affecting our other internal networks) and the problems will spill over into the other building connected by the other set of wireless routers. Also the logs on the Aironet bridges will show "memory allocation errors".

To try to fix these we did the following:
- made sure our antennas are pointing at eachother
- installed the latest firmware for the wirleess bridges
- power cycled the bridges
- connected the ethernet from the bridge to different port(s) on the switch
- replaced one or more of them with new Aironets (same model)

The last time this happened which was last week, we purchased a new Aironet 1300 and replaced one of the Aironets with it. The problems stopped for several days, then restarted again.

We can't think of anything else to try.

Anyone have any ideas?

- mike

M/Q
03-21-2007, 05:15 PM
It would be helpful to describe the network topology in more detail. I am not understanding what you mean by spilling over to other networks either. have you tried using a packet sniffer on the network? Do you use VLANs? Any information would be helpful. Are the wireless links on different channels? Have you checked for any new wireless activity in the area?

mmartinez
07-10-2007, 12:16 PM
We figured it out a couple months ago.

Our domain controllers were periodically flooding the network with master browser contention packets. The amount of flooding would overwhelm the wireless APs. We fixed it by setting some registry keys on the DCs that let them nicely figure out who the master is.

It wasn't a problem with the Access Points at all.

Michael

M/Q
07-10-2007, 03:40 PM
Thanks for returni ng and sharing the solution.