Having issues with APs suddenly becoming slow and almost unresponsive

[rbn]

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.

[namitguy]

wittersjohan wrote:

We've got lots of FAP deployed at customers, running all kinds of FOS... At the moment we have little or no trouble, and in most cases where we have issues it's related to client side drivers or Mac's.

We did have some issues in the past due to radio provisioning being enabled or the ap being used as sniffer. But these were bugs in earlier releases of FGT and FAP firmware.

I suggest that you check the FAP's when facing issues to check memory and CPU load. If these are high, try disabling radio provisioning and/or rogue scanning.

Thanks for the comments Johan.  We're a Fortinet partner and have numerous FortiAP deployments running without a hitch, this is the first one where we're experiencing such widespread issues.  You're comments re the memory and CPU load are certainly valid and was the first variables we excluded (as mentioned we spent about a month working with TAC on this).

The fact that Fortinet provided us with various (3 in total if I remember correctly) private interim builds seems indicative of a bug that they are aware of.  I have re-opened my TAC case, I have also requested TAC provided clarity on which firmware build to run on the FAP221C platform.  I will keep this thread updated with their feedback.

[rbn]

wittersjohan wrote:

We've got lots of FAP deployed at customers, running all kinds of FOS... At the moment we have little or no trouble, and in most cases where we have issues it's related to client side drivers or Mac's.

We did have some issues in the past due to radio provisioning being enabled or the ap being used as sniffer. But these were bugs in earlier releases of FGT and FAP firmware.

I suggest that you check the FAP's when facing issues to check memory and CPU load. If these are high, try disabling radio provisioning and/or rogue scanning.

By the way... since all my clients are Mac users. What kind of drivers did you have problems with?

EDIT: sorry, my mistake, you said client drives or Mac. But still... what did you find out with the Macs. Since that are all my users, I need to get those working as you might understand ;)

[Johan_Witters]

The number of interim builds does seem to indicate issues... could also be that they are free wheeling, offering possible fixes without knowing what's the issue and what's causing it..

[Johan_Witters]

I'm not a mac expert, but there are some issues in Mac OS, make sure your customers have the latest patches installed.

In general we have issues with macs and Iphones etc when using anything else than WPA/AES or portal authentication. Issues reported are slow connection, frequent disconnects, not able to connect etc.. According to what I've been able to find on the issue Apple has a different view on wireless security which causes some issues

[rbn]

wittersjohan wrote:

I'm not a mac expert, but there are some issues in Mac OS, make sure your customers have the latest patches installed.

In general we have issues with macs and Iphones etc when using anything else than WPA/AES or portal authentication. Issues reported are slow connection, frequent disconnects, not able to connect etc.. According to what I've been able to find on the issue Apple has a different view on wireless security which causes some issues

What do you mean by WPA/AES. Do you mean the standard WPA2 Personal setting, or was this was solved by choosing any other setting from the CLI?

[Johan_Witters]

rbn wrote:

What do you mean by WPA/AES. Do you mean the standard WPA2 Personal setting, or was this was solved by choosing any other setting from the CLI?

Yes, the default WPA(2)-PSK settings work in most cases. But I've had issues too with rogue detect and radio resource provisioning as well and had to disable it to get the macs stable.. Collegues used to configure TKIP, but that turned out to be a bad idea.

On the most recent builds I've got the impression the default settings work.

[namitguy]

Hi All,

TAC has provided me with interim build 0241, along with the following comments "I notice that the version provided by the previous engineer is 5.2.3 build 239. After that build, several issues have been fixed in that code trunk."

We have deployed this build now - will update on whether or not there's any improvent.

[Mircea_Mitu]

Any updates on this?

I also encounter the same issue on multiple sites especially with Apple devices (Macs and iPhones). There's no way to tell the customer that their devices are faulty because with other wifi solutions (especially Apple AirPort) are working just fine.

The symptoms are frequent temporary freezings of network connections. If I turn wifi off and on on a device, it works ok. I experienced this with FortiAP 221C and controllers ranging from 40C to 200D.

ruan.kotze wrote:

Hi All,

TAC has provided me with interim build 0241, along with the following comments "I notice that the version provided by the previous engineer is 5.2.3 build 239. After that build, several issues have been fixed in that code trunk."

We have deployed this build now - will update on whether or not there's any improvent.

[gerardor]

Hi i am also having the same issue with OS devices and fortiAPs.

I had tried all the solutions that are described in this thread with no solution.

The fact that annoys me is the fortinet's attitude, I really dont know why do they keep realising new FortiAP firmwares with new "features" when they simply cannot maintain a regular connection with OS devices and the fact that this known issue is never listed in theirs release notes annoys me more

I can confirm that the Ruckus AP's in conjunction with Fortigate works very well and dont have this issues. As everyone had stated before is so embarrassing telling our clients that the solution that supposedly is an enterprise solution had this kind of issues.

I hope that they release a definitive solution and not only a new firmware telling us to "prove it" I had a TAC open ticket with this issue with zero advance

Sorry for my poor english, i'm from Mexico. Gerardo Romero

Network Security Alliance gerardo.romero@networksecurityalliance.com

[Randall_Farr]

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.