Home Network Design help with L3 Switch

[coxhaus]

Glad you figured it out. My switch is a little different than yours. I guess Cisco improved ACLs in your switch.

So is your network running well and fast now?

 

[trpltongue]

Yeah, everything is working very well. I’ve got a laptop and a few other wireless devices connected and working great.

I’ve moved the equipment into my equipment room now and run a pair of cat5e to the living room for the WAP581.

Right now the WAP581 is just connected with a single wire.

The only thing I don’t understand very well is why my devices seem to bounce back and forth between wireless AC and wireless N.

 

[degrub]

What is the 5GHz db signal level when they switch off of AC ?
The other issue could be insufficient power to the WAP through POE.

 

[trpltongue]

I’m not really sure about the signal level. I’ll try to check on that next time.

I should have plenty of power to the WAP. Based on the switch GUI, the WAP is currently getting 27W.

 

[degrub]

what is the spec for provided per port power draw limit ?
and the 581 is supposed to consume how much at what voltage ?you might swap ethernet cable or test a plug in wall wart if it has a power supply provided.

the only other thing i can think of is energy efficient ethernet is some how getting triggered, but if it is happening while you are doing something on wireless, then that is out.

Go into the local syslogs on the WAP and see if it is telling you about the drop/reconnect.

 

[trpltongue]

what is the spec for provided per port power draw limit ?
and the 581 is supposed to consume how much at what voltage ?you might swap ethernet cable or test a plug in wall wart if it has a power supply provided.

the only other thing i can think of is energy efficient ethernet is some how getting triggered, but if it is happening while you are doing something on wireless, then that is out.

Go into the local syslogs on the WAP and see if it is telling you about the drop/reconnect.

I’d have to double check in the specs, but I confirmed that the switch and WAP are compatible. The WAP581 doesn’t have a wall wart unfortunately.

I did confirm that energy efficient Ethernet is not enabled.

Good idea to check the syslog on the 581, I’ll see if I can dig into that tonight.

 

[coxhaus]

You probably want to stay with the POE+ switch over a wall wart. Did you swap the Europe switch for a North America switch?

Since you ran 2 cables for the WAP581 I would try the other one and see if it makes any difference.

I have had some strange things happen with green energy settings. I believe mine are off but my switch is a lot older. So I would try everything else first.

 

[trpltongue]

I've checked the logs and don't see anything showing the device switching from AC to N. For example, tonight, when I logged on with my phone I got this message:
"Assoc request from xxxxx BSSID xxxx SSID FBIVan_1"
"STA xxxx associated with BSSID xxxxx"
"STA xxxx pairwise key exchange completed (WPAv2)"
"The wireless client with MAC address xxxx has been successfully authenticated"
The phone directly connected via N, rather than AC.

I checked the signal strength and the 2.4Ghz radio is about 5db higher strength than the 5Ghz radio.

I turned off the 2.4Ghz radio and everything connects to AC with no issues.

 

[degrub]

likely that is your issue then. You can try cutting the power level down on the 581 2.4 GHz radio, but the Cisco controls are fairly coarse.
Unless you have a reach issue, you can leave the 2.4 GHz radio off. If you need it on, you can set up specific devices to only connect to 5 GHz by blocking the MAC address on the 2.4 GHz radio during authentication if i remember the configuration options correctly. Or you might only specify certain specific devices (MAC) as able to connect to the 2.4 GHz radio -cameras or such perhaps.

 

[trpltongue]

Is there any reduction in MIMO throughput if I disable the 2.4Ghz radio? One of the main reasons I picked the 581 was to take advantage of the 4x4x4 throughout capabilities.

 

[coxhaus]

Are you running band steering? I turned my band steering off.

I turned on preferred band 5GHz on my laptop intel driver.

 

[trpltongue]

I’m not running band steering. That’s a good point. I can turn on the preferred band in my laptop wireless as well, but not the iphones. I don’t mind setting up different SSIDs for the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands, but I thought that I had to run both bands to get full throughout on the unit. I need to re-educate myself on the WiFi units

 

[trpltongue]

Just found the answer to my question on the Cisco website:


Supports 4 x 4, multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology on 5.0-GHz radio and 3 x 3 MIMO technology on 2.4-GHz radio for maximum performance.

 

[trpltongue]

So I’m planning to add in the second WAP581 tonight. I need to run a pair of cables, but shouldn’t be too difficult.

Next step will be to enable LAG I think?

Or would it be better to put the router on a separate VLAN first and get everything off of VLAN1?

I understood that there was benefits in isolating the router to a dedicated VLAN. Additionally, from reading on SNB it sounded like the general recommendation is to keep everything off of VLAN1.

 

[coxhaus]

Setting up a second WAP581 is simple now all you have to do is change to a trunk port and plug it in. Then log into the second WAP581 as a single point setup. Cisco will take care of the rest. There is no real setup on the second WAP581.

The next thing I would is add all the rest of the VLANs before you start making changes and run it for a while to make sure our network structure is what you want.

Are you really maxing out a single port for each wireless? That is a lot of bandwidth. It won't be any faster you will just have more bandwidth. Wireless is a shared media so I don't think you can push that much bandwidth to need a LAG. I am not sure you need the LAG for wireless maybe for a NAS or server. Run some tests and see if you can max out a 1 gig port. I kind of doubt it.

 

[trpltongue]

Got the second WAP installed as mentioned. Pretty easy. Just had to login and change the name.

Regarding LAG, I don’t know that I’ll need more than 1gbps but I’ve got the cables already run....

Seriously though, I would like to be able to stream Blu-ray rips in full quality without any stuttering, while also being able to stream multiple 4K videos from the internet.

It may be total overkill, but is there a downside?

 

[coxhaus]

Try streaming your Blu-ray rips with your current setup. I don't think you will have any problems on the network side.

 

[trpltongue]

I’ll try to do some throughout tests tonight.

On a different note, I keep getting the following error when running FindIT:

As soon as I click a button (yes or no) the FindIT box goes blank and I can’t see any devices.

I can logon to the switch network manager and see them, but not through FindIT.

 

[coxhaus]

What is FindIT running on and how is it connected?

 

[trpltongue]

What is FindIT running on and how is it connected?

It’s running on my laptop connected to the main WiFi on the WAP581.