Hi there,
Recently out in the field we’ve had a few cases where an SM will show great signal levels to an AP in the AP scan, but the technician cannot get the SM to actually register and stay connected to the AP. The SM shows a check mark next to “Meets Reg Criteria” but the registration status is “Unknown”. When this happens, we also see a lot of seemingly random “SM Disassociated” messages in the AP’s log for the SM that is trying to connect. It is usually some combination of “Communication Lost” and “Invalid Security Key”, but we have also seen “Inac Timeout”, “GPFs missed”, and “No allocation on AP” mixed in to the log messages. And yes, we verified that the security key is actually correct on the SM side. We’ve chalked it up to some sort of local interference that is mangling the packets heavily over the wireless, and thus resulting in such seemingly random errors for why the SM is being disassociated, but I wanted to reach out to the forums and see if anyone else has seen this as well due to interference, or whether it may be a separate issue entirely. This is a common example of what the AP logs look like when we are having this issue. Software on the SM and AP side is 4.6.2, we have seen it on both 5GHz and 2.4GHz ePMP, but this particular example is from a 2.4.
Jan 19 13:37:35 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 95.600000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:38:38 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 158.830000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:39:33 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 213.940000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:40:44 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 284.880000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:45:48 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 588.860000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:46:38 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 638.810000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:47:26 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 686.370000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:48:04 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 724.240000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INAC MISS TIMEOUT
Jan 19 13:48:48 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 768.490000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:49:37 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 817.830000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:50:02 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 842.360000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:50:09 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 849.910000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:51:25 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 925.420000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:51:58 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 958.740000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INAC MISS TIMEOUT
Jan 19 13:52:43 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1003.360000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:53:13 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1033.340000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:54:33 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1113.240000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INAC MISS TIMEOUT
Jan 19 13:54:47 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1127.490000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:55:16 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1156.870000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 13:57:49 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1309.270000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: INVALID SECURITY KEY
Jan 19 13:58:05 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 1325.830000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 14:12:45 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 2205.280000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 14:15:49 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 2389.750000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST
Jan 19 14:17:31 AP-xxxx kernel: [ 2491.630000] SM [58:c1:7a:xx:xx:xx] aid=11 disassociated. Reason: COMMUNICATION LOST