Monday, March 18, 2019

Wireless Losing Internet Access

I have an office with a very basic network, maybe 8 people max.

Comcast
       |
SonicWall TZ300
       |
Unmanaged Switch---CloudTrax AP
       |
    LAN

We are having issues with intermittent wireless issues. Maybe once or twice a week, wireless will completely lose internet access. They will still be connected to wireless, but cannot reach certain internet locations, such as 8.8.8.8. Pinging 8.8.8.8 fails, but something like 75.75.75.75 will work fine. I run a tracert to 8.8.8.8, and the connection seems to drop about 8 jumps out of our Firewall at some random Comcast hop. At this time, wired devices work fine, no issues. And they take the same path as wireless. The only resolution we have found is to reboot the AP.

I have checked the Firewall, no issues I can find there. I've checked the packet makeup of both wired and wireless devices leaving the Firewall, and they are exactly the same except source MAC.
We have replaced the AP, brought the troublesome AP to our office and it works fine, the new AP has the same issues.
Comcast has replaced the modem, this didn't do anything.
I played around with the CloudTrax's settings, they are pretty basic but it hasn't fixed anything.
I've looked for loops, there is about 8 PCs in this office so it wasn't hard, nothing there.
The issue exists on phones and laptops, running anything from Win7 to Win10 and iOS/Android.
We replaced the Firewall(it was due to be replaced anyways)

It's worth noting, that while a laptop is connected to the wireless and it is having issues, we can still connect remotely to the physical server and RDP to the trouble laptop.

I think the only thing I can remotely think of is some device giving out massive amounts of interference in some way. I have seen a broken microwave bring down WiFi(which was incredibly hard to track down), but that is pretty far fetched. Or maybe someone is piggy backing off the WiFi and causing issues, so we might think about changing the WiFi password, but I don't see any massive spike in traffic from the AP or Firewall side.

It's troubling that only wireless is effected, so I don't believe it is a Firewall/Comcast issue. Now, we did have other internet issues at this location and it kind of overlapped these wireless issues. These issues MAY have started when we replaced the Firewall, but I don't think that is the case. If it was, I would expect the wired network to have issues as well. And I also see traffic leaving the Firewall just fine.

This all started happening about 2 months ago, and we have slowly gone through all steps we can think of. Does anyone have any ideas?



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