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Having issues with APs suddenly becoming slow and almost unresponsive

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
May 29, 2015
19 replies
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I have been fighting this for so long, I dont know what to do.

I have several sites running FGT and FAPs. Yesterday I made the desition to TFTP new firmware on all the FAPs and FGTs to see if a clean start can fix the problem. The thing is. The setup can work fine, and then all the sudden the speed is terrible. I go inside the FGT and check SNR and stuff like that and everything looks great, but it is not. Once this client had this problem and I tried to change a setting in the AP profile, and after that, poof everything was fine again.

Another client reboots the FAP when it is to slow and all the sudden everything is fine again. So it does seem to be something with the APs. But a user should have to do that.

Has anyone heard of these kind of problems. I have had so many clients having problems with the FAPs, I am att crossroad where I am seriously thinking about exchanging those and never look back. But that would be very expensive.

I spoke to some other IT guy and many of them say FAPs are ****. But I am really wondering. Is it that bad. What do you guys here on the forum think. Do you have setups with FAPs that are working great. How do you setup the FAPs.

For one thing, I noticed when I only run 5GHz on a SSID the handoff from AP to AP does not work. But if I turn on 2,4GHz it works. That seems weird. I also tried setting up different AP profiles for different APs in the same office so that I can choose band and stuff like that. As soon as I do that the users complain about lots of issues. So for now I am running everything very "auto" which I think is weird that I need to do with expensive APs like this.

Please do help out. Even if it is telling me, stay away from FAPs. But if you have a working setup with at least 3 or more APs, how does your AP profile look and things like that.

Thanks, I really hope we can solve this, or I will have a lot of APs to exchange... that will be a big hit for my company, Something I dont think I deserve since I am just trusting my distributor and selling a brand I that thought did proper products.

PS. All my clients are Mac users if that helps in some way.

Best answer by eyexmeetsxeye

I have been working with FortiAP's and Fortigates for the past 2.5 years. It has been trying to say the least. I have over 100 of the 222B line (outdoor models), paired with 100D, 140D, 80CM, and 90D's.

Before 5.0 build 86, completely broken. Daily/nightly resets to try to get people working. Build 86, mostly stable with weird quirks, usually reset about every week or two. After build 86 (the newest build 98), I reverted back to 86 based on TACs recommendation because everything ground to a halt no matter how many soft resets we did. I wouldn't touch the 5.2.X line with a 10 foot pole (I will maybe try it around 5.2.8 or so).

The problem is there are some things that work absolutely great and other things that completely break the platform.

Resource provisioning - Does not work. I love seeing all 10 of my APs on site boot up and stay on Channel 1

Mesh Backhaul - Works great over 5ghz

AP Quality - Is hit or miss. Some units will drop and need to be powercycled. One month with zero resets and the next month 5 resets. I have begun to doubt their manufacturing source.

Multiple SSIDs - Despite what they say, putting on more than a few will cause you a lot of problems

Signal strength - Great

Single SSID Handoff between APs - Usually pretty good. I have watched a tech walk around and literally jump to different APs as he walked. The only problems you get here is the actual device itself refusing to switch

Working with Controllers - CAPWAP usually works pretty spot on. I do like the ease of pairing it with units, although my main gripe is that a WIFI unit has to use a tunnel SSID versus most of your actual AP's will benefit from bridge mode

Captive Portal with 3rd party radius- Only works with 5.2.X line on Fortigate - See above about firmware

We haven't given up yet, but hope for one day a good firmware without horrible broken bugs in it. I would like to setup a hospitality site without having to worry. After reading this forum I will be trying a couple tweaks but mainly waiting for Fortinet to put some time and effort into their firmware.

Show previous replies

Randall_Farr

New Member

Curious if anyone has made any progress with these issues in the last few weeks.

I have two FAP-221Cs (v5.2-build0229) controlled by an FGT-60D running v5.2.2,build642. Throughput seems to be fantastic for 5Ghz clients, however, most clients on 2.4Ghz will have their through put drop down to < 200 k/sec if a few users in the same conference room try to access the network at the same time; conference room wall is glass and has line of sight to the FAP about 40 feet away. I've tried disabling radio #2 in the FAP (5Ghz), setting radio #1 to 802.11 n/g, disabling auto TX power, etc. I also had to disable Spectrum analysis in order to get the FAPs to reduce the constant 99-100% CPU usage and random reboots. Sad since this this was one of the features we purchased these for.

I attempted to work with support a few months ago on this, but I don't have the resources to pour into troubleshooting these issues.

yzhang_FTNT

Staff

Please try FAP build 0245, which is the FAP 5.2.4 release candidate. This build has fixed several power save related issues.

Wabo84

New Member

I am also having the same issue

We have 5 forti AP 221C connected to a FG 100D.

Users are disconnected all the time and it's very slow, on 5 Ghz its worst. After a complete reboot that works for some users for 10 minutes... Mac disconnect more often...

Very unstable, someone find a solution?

Randall_Farr

New Member

After receiving a lot of flack from users and our CEO, I finally came up with a working solution, which was to abandon the FAP-221Cs for a solution from another vendor. It's certainly not the solution that I was looking for, but after nine months of users not being able to use wifi in our conference rooms, we simply had to install something that would work. I hope for everyone's sake that Fortinet will address the outstanding performance issues with this AP. Maybe someday we can revisit this, but I don't have hours and hours to go back and forth with support, and months and months to wait for a solution.

Good luck everyone!

GusTech

New Member

Randall Farr wrote:
After receiving a lot of flack from users and our CEO, I finally came up with a working solution, which was to abandon the FAP-221Cs for a solution from another vendor. It's certainly not the solution that I was looking for, but after nine months of users not being able to use wifi in our conference rooms, we simply had to install something that would work. I hope for everyone's sake that Fortinet will address the outstanding performance issues with this AP. Maybe someday we can revisit this, but I don't have hours and hours to go back and forth with support, and months and months to wait for a solution.

Good luck everyone!

I have the same problem at many costumers, FortiWifi does not work as it should! exactly the same problems as you describe. Fortiwifi is just crap! and my clients are pissed.

I've also given up

dudarra

New Member

BrUz wrote:
I've also given up

....f**k! Sad but true...i can't believe it :\

i will open a ticket...

cheers raffa

dudarra

New Member

hey guys,

Yesterday we had the Campus meeting with ICT Team. They all complained about the disconnects and the bad performece after the Upgrade. We Upgraded the FW 300D (5.2.4 build 688) and the FAP to the new and v5.2-build0245! the performance is noticeably worser!

What is your advice? should i downgrade the FAP?

Guys need a solutions! quickly!

raffa

wanglei_FTNT

Staff

Hi Raffa,

It's difficult to give advice without digging into details. it might be related to your specific config/radio environment/user traffic etc since we have numerous customers using similar HW/SW combinations without issues. You can post some basic config related to wireless here if you don't mind. Otherwise, I suggest you open a Fortinet support ticket so our folks can better assist you.

Thanks

dudarra

New Member

cheers man,

here is my default Wlan FAP profile!

raffa

ssid.jpg

Bromont_FTNT

Staff

No channels selected? Do you have other APs/profiles?

dudarra

New Member

Yes, when you don't choose any channels, the FAP will select automatically a channel!

raffa

bellaciccod

New Member

Hi Guys,

This problem I had some month ago.

Infrastructure:

#1 cluster of 2 fortigate 60D

#2 FortiAP 24D

After upgrade e downgrade of the firmware both fgt and fortiap the problem is the same. The support doesn't solve the problem...

When one day I set 100 MBps port of my switch (HP Gigabit), where is connected the fortiAP and the problem is solved it!!!

You try it!

---

Davide

mike_dp

New Member

We have 4 sites with at least 2 FAPs each and our main office has 7 FAPs for 4 different floors. We run everything on OS 5.4 from FGTs to FAPs and never got a complaint about speed. It is slower a bit on 2.4GHz though. We have all channel picked up manualy so there's minimum interference. And tx power is at 100% for each AP.

We had stand alone AP with DD-WRT in the past and had trouble with it and now with FAPs it works like a charm (at least for now).

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