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Jesse TurnerFlag for United States of America

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Setting up Multiple Access Points and its creating a loopback

Currently I have a 2 floor building and I'm just trying to setup wirelss access points on the 1st floor.

I have one access point on one side of the building and the other on the opposite side of the building but all on the 1st floor.

I have configured them to be disabled dhcp and gave them a static ip address not in the dhcp scope, I did this on both of them.

I named them different SSID's with the same password on just WPA- AES

They are opporating at a 20mhz and one of them is on channel 9 and the other is on 11

Now what happens is everything works fine for a little while but then just randomly it will start freaking out my network almost causing a loopback like symptom. I go upstairs to my network room and all my switches are freaking out, massive lights blinking and some users start losing connectivity and cannot access shared drives or internet or exchange server, etc.. So I have to unplug one of the wifi access points and everything goes back to normal.

At first I had named them almost something similar like CEI and CEI1 and the techsupport rep at the manufacturer said do not do that, it will cause a loop back.

So Now there completely different names and its still happening.

What am I doing wrong here?????
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maximus5328
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What is the model of your APs?
BTW, it's OK to have the same SSID on both APs.
It sounds like they have some sort of automatic WDS enabled.

If they have options like Wireless access point with WDS and another option with just Wireless Access Point select the latter.

If there are on options similar to that try and disable WDS as this could cause the loop you are describing.
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There are Amped Wireless devices ap300's. They have WPS but I disabled them, what is WDS??

There is an option in there for it to be set as a SERVER, Client, Auto or Disable.

I picked Disable because that allows me to give it a static IP address.
WDS is Wifi Distribution System and allows you to extend wireless networks (basically a repeater which is why it would cause loops if both access points are connected to a wired network)

WPS is Wifi Protected Setup which allows PIN numbers to be used when connecting devices rather than passphrases and keys.

I have looked at the manual and don't see any mention of WDS, I also noticed that they talk about chaining the access points using the inbuilt ports.  Since they have a live chat option on their website I would give that a go and speak with one oif their tech support guys explaininbg that you have symptoms that resembe a loop when using multiple access points connected to different switches.

Are you connecting to your switches using the Blue Network Port ?

You can access their live chat with tech support on the following link

http://www.ampedwireless.com/support/model/ap300.html


Darren.
What if they reside on the same switch?

Also I'm not using the network port, I did at first and it caused the issue then they told me that the SSID's cannot be the same so I changed them but still ran into the problem

Then I tried to plug them into the other ports and the problem stopped but only for a little while.

I will try there techsupport again but not sure if they can even explain it
If your wiring all terminates to a single point, then I would use the recommeneded approach of approach of using the blue network point on one access point and connecting it to your wired network.  When this has stabalised( 3 mins) connect the 2nd access point's blue port to one of the other ports on the 1st access point (I don't believe you need a power supply on the second access point using this method).

If this does not resolve the issue, you could try disconnecting the ethernet cable from the 2nd access point, connect a client directly to the 2nd access point and see if it is able to access resources on the network, this would then indicate that the AP's are indeed using WDS.

It is of course possible that you have a faulty unit(s).

Darren.

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Jesse Turner
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Nobody knew they had the same MAC addresses