Ruckus Wireless Problems

Here’s my recap of the wireless issues I have been having with Ruckus. It’s been a crazy adventure to say the least.

Hardware:

• 2 Zone Director 3000’s. One is our failover which sits on our separate campus
• Roughly 70 R500 APs with a few R700s and T300s for outside coverage.
• ZD running 10.0.1.0 build 61 but the issue was still happening on 9.x

Areas Affected:

• Humanties (HUM)
• World Languages (WL)
• IS Office (IS)
• The HUM and WL buildings are near each other physically but are on 2 separate switches that don’t intersect. IS is on a completely different side of campus.

Issue:

• At random times our users in the 3 separates areas of the school lose internet access for roughly 10 to 15 minute intervals. The client stays authenticated with the AP but all traffic is slow or doesn’t work at all. Pinging from the client to the AP, Default Gateway, Core Switch, ZD, or outside to a website is intermittent. Many dropped pings happen during this time. All wired traffic works perfectly fine. Also pining the AP from a wired client works with no dropped packets. The issue is between client an AP. This occurs at very random times, is not reproducible manually, and at least happens once or twice a day to the various areas. The issue seems to only happen to clients on the 5GHz connection. All 2.4GHz traffic seems to pass through fine. This includes devices of all types including Apple, Windows, Android, etc... I've been workin with Ruckus engineers both on the phone and onsite to help the issues.

Troubleshooting:

• Wireless analysis determining if there’s noise on 2.4 & 5GHz both while the issue is happening and while it’s not with no considerable changes or red flags.
• Turned off different 5GHz channels the clients were connected to eliminate channel issues.
• Test multiple SSID WLANS and the issue occurs on all of them.
• Set BSS Min Rate to 12.00mbps
• Enabled ProxyARP
• Turned on DFS channels
• Turned off tunneling
• Enabled performance mode on ZD
• Created an entirely new network VLAN that doesn’t have internet access and put both the ZD and AP’s on it to isolate the devices from any random traffic that could be hitting the en0 port.
• Ruckus engineers have taken many different Wireshark captures and system info files and have compared them to times the issue is happening and when it does not.
• Performance logs of individual AP’s while the issue is happening and when it’s not.
• Today we physically replaced our APs that Ruckus has loaned us in various area which are all R500’s. (Keeping my fingers crossed)

We’ve clearly done a ton of troubleshooting. After our testing it would be hard to believe that this is a network or RF issue at this point. I’m convinced it’s a software/firmware issue on their end. The claim they “Have never seen this issue before” but the issue is going on 5-6 months.

Any insight or tips would be super helpful! Thanks you very much!