We recently deployed over 2000 Cisco 1850w WAPs at the UT Dallas campus and have experienced an extremely high failure rate. At this point we have lost over 25% of them. We have had Cisco on site to review the install and are waiting on their report and EFA on 6 of the initial WAPs that died. The issue appears to be power related as the failures have mostly occurred during thunderstorms.
Approximately 1500 of the 1810w WAPs are deployed in older apartment buildings with the switch gear in NEMA 3 boxes outside the apartments. These buildings (45 total) were built as commercial apartments in the late 80's early 90's with no facilities to house gear. In these locations we have 24 port Cisco IE4010 switches connected to the WAPs. Due to a limited POE budget with the dual 150W power supplies in the IE4010 only the first 12 WAPs are powered by the switch. The other 12 are powered by a 12 port POE injector. We have only seen failures on WAPs plugged directly into the switch. The POE injector appears to be acting as some type of shield for the WAPs and is protecting them. They still go down but by unplugging them from the injector and plugging them back in they will recover. The WAPs plugged into the switch are completely dead and will not power on. A replacement WAP in that same switch port will function. The failures are randomly distributed across the buildings. Usually only a few per switch. We see the following error at the switch when this occurs. Jul 7 15:57:33 CDT: %ILPOWER-3-CONTROLLER_PORT_ERR: Controller port error, Interface Gi1/14: Power Controller reports power Imax error detected Jul 7 15:57:35 CDT: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface GigabitEthernet1/14, changed state to down Jul 7 15:57:36 CDT: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface GigabitEthernet1/14, changed state to down Jul 7 16:01:08 CDT: %ILPOWER-3-CONTROLLER_PORT_ERR: Controller port error, Interface Gi1/16: Power Controller reports power Imax error detected Jul 7 16:01:09 CDT: %ILPOWER-3-CONTROLLER_PORT_ERR: Controller port error, Interface Gi1/1: Power Controller reports power Imax error detected We have also had failures in building where we are using Cisco 3850s and the equipment is located in a typical wiring closet inside the building. We had 200 go down Friday at around 4:00pm during a severe storm. It is the first time we have had a failure in our newer residential halls too. This particular building was built a few years ago and is setup like the rest of the academic buildings on campus. We haven't had any issues with the 1000+ Cisco WAPs we have deployed across the rest of campus. If anyone has encountered this or has any ideas we are all ears. Thanks, Brian Dourty Associate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer University of Texas at Dallas 573-268-6871 - Cell 972-883-6600 - Office ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
