Gosh - why are you mixing firmware versions? That’s going to cause weird problems quite likely. We’ve always found that the best results are with the AP and all SM’s to have the same firmware versions.
If you think about it, the only reason to come out with new firmware, is:
Need new features, or
Discovered bugs or shortcomings in older version.
So - 4.6.1 resolved bugs and added features not found in 4.6.0 or 4.5.6 or 4.4.3… then upgrading only 1/2 of the radios to the bug free version isn’t likely going to work very well. I’d strongly recommend having the AP and its SM’s on the same firmware. For us, 4.6.1 is deployed on everything (AP’s SM’s 5Ghz & 2.4Ghz PTP550 and all Force300 Backhauls - and no issues showing up for us.
We have found that the v4.x firmware is NOT mix and match… having just a single SM with a different version of 4.x.x will very often cause problems that affect the client or the AP.
We have customers move in to places we already have service installed and plugging in radios that haven’t been online for many many months sometimes. Since 4.x.x firmware this causes all kinds of problems sometimes.
It seems the higher the version the less friendly it is with anything other than itself.
I agree. But I dont usually update all APs immediately after a release comes out. I find that to be kindly dangerous on a large network. And it just so happened we had some SMs our installers were trying to use that were on 4.6.1. I can surely work towards getting all APs & SMs on the same version but it wouldve been nice if it had been disclosed this was a requirement to use 4.6.1.
So many reasons there would be a radio that isn’t running the same firmware as the others on the AP.
For whatever reason installer not able to use radio provided for the install and uses one that has been on the truck for a while and wasn’t updated to current version of software.
Installer ends up installing customer on tower other than the one radio was set up for. The new tower is running a different version (because we roll out firmware updates slowly, cautiously and one tower at a time at first).
Customer’s service was off for a long time then one day they plug the radio back in (especially fun when it’s the magical combination of mixed versions that cause the AP to start rebooting…)
Sometimes a customer radio just manages to slip through the cracks. For example customer radios that refuse to take updates, gets hung during updates, won’t reboot after an update, can’t be accessed via HTTP or SSH.
Or now since even the CPE’s have two copies of firmware the AP or the CPE can be running a different version if either reverts to the backup bank (assuming you like to live dangerously and the backup bank had a different version). So now two reasons to make sure both banks have the same version of the firmware.
Hi. If you’re replying to me - I was only suggesting making sure that this one AP and it’s SMs are on the same version. Different AP’s can be different versions if you don’t want to upgrade the whole network at once - that’s fine, that’s up to you. We ran all our older ePMP1000/2000 & ePMP 2.4Ghz stuff on 3.5.6 for a long time, with just the 3000s/F300’s on 4.x latest versions.
I just just saying that with pretty much any gear from any brand, if they discover a bug in version X.5 of the firmware, and they come out with X.6 to fix it… then applying that fix to either just the APs or just the SMs is probably only ‘half fixing’ the problem. It’s usually recommended to apply it to BOTH the AP and it’s SM’s. Even if that’s just 1 AP to start… that’s cool… but apply it to both the AP and the SM’s connected to that AP for the most consistent results.
I am agreeing with Brubble and Ninedd, this is a sector thing not a network thing. Dumping the latest FW on a network is dangerous and disruptive. We have a couple towers to start with (no business clients makes a good target) after we test on the bench first. Nothing like abusing a new FW to show the behavior first. Then we push to the target tower, target sector SMs then AP. wait a couple days while logging everything to ensure that its stable in the wild. Most of us old hats have been doing this a long time and have been burned by firmware updates that kill a section of the network forcing a truck roll to go fix it, we have learned to be slow and methodical.
We are updating our network from 4.5.5 to 4.6.1 today and have had a few ePMP2000 APs that are not accepting clients until we switch the antenna selection from AUTO to Forced sector. Once we start to see clients reconnect, we are able to switch back to AUTO and clients come back online as normal.
Im trying to use that “Max MCS Downlink” feature and it kinda works. On a F300-25, im setting it to DS MCS 3 but from performance page it sort of limits it. SM would get up to DS MCS 7. I went ahead and rebooted SM and now it appears its being limited to DS MCS 5.
There are two max MCS conditions, on the AP you control the max up from the SM but the SM controlls the max MCS for the down link.
The SM will still use higher MCS for frame decoding and short burst traffic but should drop to the max threshold on sustained data.
Also, this is an different topic, you should have started a new thread for your issue.
Yes, but support for the Force 200L started with 4.7. I specifically remember because 4.7 had that year long beta, and we were less than amused that Cambium were selling the HW for more than a year without a GA release supporting it, only a beta. It came out the factory with a terrible alpha and we had to direct all our customers to the beta sign-ups. Release note snip below.
When we tried to load older GA’s it wouldn’t take, but that was back in 2022, maybe it’s changed now. If it hasn’t then 4.6.1 won’t take on a F200L, at least it didn’t for us.
I had got my hands on an f200L at the time and didnt have problems with it connecting using 4.6.1 on the AP, it just had horrible throughput and was terribly sensitive to power flickers.
Of course at the time we were not testing for all possible configurations and just against our system at the time which was 10 and 20mhz channels.
Since the f200L came from factory with 4.5FW IDK, but I do know that it wasnt worth the additional issues we seen for the relatively small difference in cost.
We’ve always found that the best results are with the AP and all SM’s to have the same firmware versions.