Meraki AP's 169 addresses

[Johnwhdavies]

We have a block that has a mesh setup of 13 access points and up until a scheduled update last Friday to firmware MT 25.9 everything was working fine. Since people returned on Monday we are getting users who are being assigned 169 addresses and if I get them to walk to another access point then they pick up a network address. I have since rolled back the firmware and we are still getting a spate of users being issued 169's.

This isn't any specific access point, it is all of them.

DHCP is taken care of by a third party and I have spoken to them who said that there are no issues with the scope and we have enough IP addresses to manage all our users.

My question is, why since we updated the firmware are we getting users that are getting 169 addresses? Any ideas

Thanks in advance

John

[Uberseehandel]

Well, APIPA addresses (169.254.0.0/16) get handed out when clients cannot find a DHCP server. So something in the configuration of the APs has changed so that they no longer give clients access to the 3rd party DHCPs. That is the "logical" reason. The real reason may turn out to be more prosaic.

[Johnwhdavies]

Thanks, I understand the 169 issues but this is just a few people who have experienced it, moving around solves this, not something I have experienced on the network before.

The configuration on the AP is static address, gateway and dns along with the license so no other configuration than that. Have unplugged the last fitted AP which again was Friday just before the scheduled upgrade to see if there is an issue there.

Thanks

john

[Uberseehandel]

• Have you been able to notice a difference between those users who don't get an address and those that never have the problem?
• Are all the WiFi users on the same VLAN?
• Has anything changed as far as the DHCP options are concerned on the VLAN(s), or firewall permissions?
• Anything changed with respect to 802.11w or r - that might explain why some users are OK?

[Johnwhdavies]

Thanks again for your reply

• Have you been able to notice a difference between those users who don't get an address and those that never have the problem?
  • Nope, there is no pattern at all with the users, very strange.
• Are all the WiFi users on the same VLAN?
  • All the users are on the same VLAN for wireless clients.
• Has anything changed as far as the DHCP options are concerned on the VLAN(s), or firewall permissions?
  • From the information I have from the third party nothing has changed as far as DHCP is concerned and the scope is good.
• Anything changed with respect to 802.11w or r - that might explain why some users are OK?
  • Hmmmm, could look at this one.

Have just created another heat map to see if anything shows on that and the coverage is good.

Will keep an eye out since the newly installed was removed.

Thanks

John

[Mr_IT_Guy]

Are all the users who are getting the 169 address connecting to the same AP?

[Johnwhdavies]

Nope, different APs 

Thanks for your input.

John

[PhilipDAth]

Unfortunately you are probably going to need to get a packet capture of this happening.  Then you can see what is actually getting sent and received for the DHCP conversation.

[yvesneptune]

it seems like a bug, i had the same problem and found a solution. I applied a firewall rule on VLAN that the host is.

from Any source to Any destination allow UDP port 67 to the clients.

This port is for DHCP Server destination to the clients