intermittent access point/router connection issues

[nognielsen]

I have a building with a 881W. As the building is older the only wireless access points minus the 881w are in the clerks offices' They are just consumer netgear wireless routers. They have been working fine for years. (I know I should switch to the 1041N eventually)

Well in the last month a ward called me saying the wireless on their side of the building was down so I troubleshot it and discovered in the clerks office plugging directly from the wall to the clerks computer, the 881W assigned a address just fine and the clerk was good to go to do MLS and whatever. However trying to get the netgear router to get an address from the 881w from the same port was unsuccessful, so naturally I thought it was the router. I took it home and upgraded the firmware and tested and it worked fine at home. Bringing it back a week later all seemed to be fixed. (I even assigned it a static IP address from the 881W)

Well last week the ward clerk called again and said the same problem occurred, so he just bypassed the router and plugged directly in the wall from the clerks computer and everything worked fine for him to do MLS/tithing, just no wireless. So I was at a loss.

Well today the other ward on the other side said they've been having the same problem for about the last month! They've just plugged right into the wall to get MLS working, So no way both routers somehow go bad at the same time... What gives?

Again the 881w dhcp seems to be working fine. The 881w wireless feature is working as well Also plugging in my foreign laptop into the network jack yields a good address as well. The 881w just doesnt seem to want to play nice with the netgear routers. Even setting a static address worked only temporarily...

Any ideas?

[lajackson]

Your wireless access points are probably fine. Read this topic on 881W problems over the last few weeks and see if the timing of your troubles matched the two weeks that were particularly bad earlier this month.

[rolandc]

Sounds like double NATing to me, disable the the netgears DHCP and try it again. The 881 has to be the boss and the netgears just need to hand out IP's assigned by the 881.

CHQ would have no control over the non 1041n AP's so its not the wireless controller issue.

[jdlessley]

rolandc is correct. In addition to disabling the DHCP in the netgear routers, I would assign a static IP address to them, just as you have done previously. I would also assign static IP addresses to the clerk computers.