devices connected to ethernet port of mesh repeater not always responding

[jmoake]

I am using MR 86 APs as gateway and repeater.  I have Allen-Bradley electric meters connected to the ethernet port of the repeater so we can remotely gather electrical usage in our factory.  they have web servers built in.  Sometimes they respond to pings fine.  sometimes they don't.  sometimes after a couple ping timeouts, they start responding fine.  Usually they respond to HTTP requests even when they are slow to start responding to pings, and when the web session is running, pings are always fine.  

I have several of these GW/Repeater pairs in our plant.  some seem to work fine.  some seem intermittent.  one doesn't let me ping across to the meters at all.  I can see the IP addresses of the client devices in the list of clients.  the repeater AP can ping the device(s) attached locally to it, but I can't ping it from the GW AP or anything else on the network. some repeaters have a small industrial switch with 2 or 3 electrical meters.   

I just upgraded the firmware to MR 27.5.1 last night and still see problems today.  All the devices are on the same subnet with the APs in one site on the Meraki dashboard.  wireless clients work fine from the repeater APs, although they are on a different SSID than the meters.

I know this is a very specific problem, but any troubleshooting tips would be appreciated.  It seems to stem from the network traffic being initiated form the network, and not from the devices on the wired port of the repeater AP

[cmr]

@jmoake is it possible to leave a different wired device with a webserver on it connected to one of the troublesome APs, maybe via a spare switch port on the industrial switches?  This might help focus on whether it is device type specific or multiple device types on the same AP.

[jmoake]

I had a laptop on the L2 switch connect behind the repeater AP.  i could get out fine with it.  I didn't leave it there to try and reach back in to it from the rest of the network.  I will give it a try.  Thanks

[Twitch]

We have a similar setup using MR74 (gateways) and MR30H (repeaters) APs, also in a factory-type environment - welding machines connect to the Ethernet ports of the repeaters. Our connections have been bomber-solid with this setup, fortunately.

Could your issue be related at all to line-of-sight? Is there equipment that could be interfering, such as overhead cranes carrying loads or other equipment getting in-between the gateway and repeater?

We are a steel fabrication shop that fabricates steel for skyscrapers and other large structures. We sometimes have wireless issues if the shop if fabricating a very large piece that gets in the way of an AP or somehow hinders the signal.

One thing we also do is limit connections to the repeaters to only the devices that are connected to them via the switchports by using the Tag feature in the dashboard. Could user traffic be interfering somehow with the traffic coming from the meters?

Have you had a chance to look at the wireless bridge document at this link:

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Extending_the_LAN_with_a_Wireless...

Hope something here helps.

[jmoake]

Thanks for the thoughts.  looking like the industrial hubs behind the AP is the primary problem.  at one of the locations, i can connect the power meters directly to the AP ethernet port and they work fine.  When the meters are behind the switch, they lose connectivity.  Part of the problem could be the meters don't initiate any communications.  The metering "system" polls the meters.