Raspberry pi connection issues with Meraki

[dmiss]

Hi Everyone,

We have about 12 laptop charging stations that have raspberry pi with wireless adapters integrated. Im having an overall large issue with connecting to the wireless.  I will get "client has left AP" over and over. I was able to consistently connect one of the towers to a Mifi hotspot that I had on hand with no issue. My SSID is currently broadcasting both 2.4 & 5, 802.11r is disabled. On the dashboard, I will see it connect for a hot sec and then drop off. Any help would be great as I've been reaching out to both ends (manufacturer and Meraki support) and both point to each other.

[AjitKumar]

Hi @dmiss 

The Meraki documentation suggest the following reason for this event.

• 802.11 disassociation: client has left AP - A client informed the AP that it should no longer keep the client in its association table. You may see this if the client has potentially gone into a hibernate state, a powered down state, or the client may have chosen to roam to another AP.

Do you think this could be a reason?

Few suggestions.

• Try "Disabling band steering" if already not.
• If you see lots of SSIDs in your Air Marshal scans. Try setting the Channel width to 20 if already not.

[dmiss]

I've looked this up as well and I have band steering disabled and all of our radios are set to 20 and still nothing. 

[BlakeRichardson]

@dmiss  Is the client getting an IP address as you woud expect?, I wonder if its not getting an address so its killing the connection. 

[dmiss]

Some I have set to dhcp (and whitelisted the mac address on the dhcp server), others I have set to a static ip and still nothing. 

[BlakeRichardson]

What firmware are the MR running?

[dmiss]

MR 26.2

also, I moved one of the APs into my test network and downgraded it to the lastest stable 25.13 & the results were no different. 

[PhilipDAth]

I run Ubuntu on my Pi's - and I don't recall seeing or having this issue.

[CptnCrnch]

Same here: a lot of Raspberries running Ubuntu or Raspbian without a single issue at all.

[NolanHerring]

Are you able to run a packet capture/wireshark on the Raspberry Pi on its WLAN interface by any chance?

[dmiss]

I dont have access to the pi since its 3rd party owned/managed...but I was able to run a sniffer from my macbook and had Meraki support review the pcaps. they stated that the pi is sending probe request and the AP is returning them but nothing in the pcap shows the pi sending authentication requests. I relayed this info over to the manufacturer and ultimately, they keep saying its not them. I firmly believe something is up with the Pi itself, but I wanted to run this through the forum to get some fresh eyes. 

[DavidTX]

I am experiencing this very same issue. I have read through this thread and tried some of the suggestions such as disabling band steering and ensuring channel width is set to 20.

I have also tried:

• Moving DHCP from the Meraki to the LAN 
• Establishing a static IP through DHCP reservation
• Isolating the SSID to a single AP at arms length away from the Pi 

The interesting part is that I recently replaced ~30 Aruba APs with the Meraki MR42s. Previously with the Aruba APs in place, no problem was visible and the Pi's had weeks of uptime. After replacing with the MR42, the best uptime i experience is 3 hours.

I would like to experiment with different firmware versions but it appears i can only push a new firmware across an entire network rather than the one i am using for testing. Is this correct or is there a way to flash firmware on a single device?

[dmiss]

Hi David,

It’s good to hear that I’m not the only one lol! What I ended up doing so I could test with a different firmware version was move my ap to a test environment network (copied my live environment). However, I only rolled it back to the last stable release (my production environment is in the Beta).

[DavidTX]

My connectivity issue Pi's appears to have been resolved. 

I took a single MR42 and set it up on it's own wireless network with Meraki defaults. I configured the default SSID with. Wep2 PSK and after connecting a Pi to the SSID have had 12 hours of succes . I'll let it ride over the weekend but I am fairly confident the issue has been resolve . 

There must be something in my main site wireless template that is creating the conflict. 

[dmiss · Accepted solution]

Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions! At this point, we have ruled it to be faulty HW of the pi (my opinion lol) & am looking into alternatives solutions. 

[DavidTX]

Interesting!

Keep us updating as to if this fixes it for you. For me, it is an issue in the AP template. Setting up an AP on a new wireless network using the Meraki-default template resolved the problem for me.

[VIVEKMOHAN]

Im having the same issue, WEP2 or WPA2... will it solve the issue? 

[DavidTX]

Changing authentication didn't help me. I got away from a combined hardware network and switched to the default meraki wireless template - no problems since this change.