Wireless Weirdness

[ManagerJay]

I have been experiencing intermittent connection problems and this morning I was able to find what might be the culprit, but I would like to know if anyone else has seen this problem.

Periodically, I will be disconnected from my company's WAN. I am able to access everything on the LAN side just fine. Only WAN connectivity is affected.

Today, I was able to isolate the problem to the router (Netvana 3305). I am seeing an incomplete entry for the MAC address for my IP address in the arp table. The wireless AP (Cisco 1131AG) and the network switch (HP ProCurve 2626) show complete ARP entries for the Mac. Other operating systems such as Windows XP do not seem to be affected. However, my other FreeBSD server which is wireless does seem to be affected by this problem also.

This is not specific to this office. It also happens when I am traveling to other offices as well.

Restarting the AirPort on the Mac will temporarily correct the problem. I am running 10.5.5 on Intel based hardware.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,


Jay

 

[ManagerJay]

I have run a packet capture and what I have seen is the Mac is not answering ARP requests.

I see the Who has 10.129.20.47? Tell 10.129.20.1.

But I do not see a response from the Mac. Running OS X 10.5.5.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,


Jay

 

[SYQUEST]

Could it be a signal or interference issue with the wireless transmission? Does it do it on all channels?

Just guessing...

....JIM....

 

[ManagerJay]

Yes, it happens on all channels.

I think I found the solution this morning.

When using a Cisco AP with non-Cisco devices, they recommend enabling arp-caching and checking the box for "Forward ARP Requests To Radio Interfaces When Not All Client IP Addresses Are Known".

This seems to have solved the problem. If anything changes, I will post back.

Thanks for your help.


Jay