Meraki AP not showing down in Dashboard

[Naresh_Bhardwaj]

Hi All,

We are doing new deployment of Meraki MR AP's in our environment. We are still using the traditional Switch and Firewall apart from Meraki MS and MX.

We have connected one Meraki AP for testing purpose and we are getting "Unavailable because access point is offline." and "Has never connected to the Meraki cloud"  when i check the status at Meraki Dashboard.

Can someone please help with the troubleshooting step can be followed to check the connectivity.

[NolanHerring]

Not much else to go on here, your AP does not have Internet access. Could be a million things that have nothing to do with the Meraki AP.

You could try connecting to the same switch yourself on that port and see if you have Internet access and go from there. 

[Naresh_Bhardwaj]

Is there anyway to check if the firewall is blocking the connectivity between the Meraki AP and Meraki Cloud.

can i check it in this way to just connect the laptop with the cable connected to MR and try to ping the Meraki dashboard IP address like "api.meraki.com".... or 64.62.142.12. If ping if fine then rules are in place in Firewall. Any other suggestion ?

[NolanHerring]

You'll have to confirm on your firewall if the ports are allowed:

https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Other_Topics/Upstream_Firewall_Rules_for_Clo...

[PhilipDAth]

If you unplug the MR and plug the notebook into the same switch port, can you browse web sites?

[RomanMD]

If you have your AP ports configured as Trunk, make sure you have a native vlan and that you have DHCP in that vlan. Afterwards you can confirm that the AP is getting an IP address from DHCP.

And last but not least, why wouldn't you check the firewall logs for any drops with the source address of AP? 

[TBHPTL]

Start more basic....

Are you at the same location as the AP? Verify firstly that the AP has power. Then verify the status of the LED on the AP what is it doing? If the AP  does not have have Internet connectivity,  it will broadcast a survival SSID.

If a Meraki Access Point does not have a configuration from the Meraki Cloud Controller it will instead broadcast a default SSID of "Meraki-Scanning." The AP takes an address of 10.128.128.128, the SSID runs DHCP, and it will try to assign any clients that associate with it an address. This is merely to provide a connection between a client and the AP to allow for local configuration.

You can associate to this SSID and see the local status page which will tell you where the device failing.