AP6 Pro works great, AP6 requires Backup Network

Access Points
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If you haven’t been following along - new customer/adopter of Alta Labs for my (admittedly over-engineered) home wireless and I love it.

Replaced my consumer-grade wifi mesh system with two AP6 Pros. Had minor initial issues due to my implementation but got past them and humming along.

Purchased an AP6 non-pro to round out the network and address a low-coverage area. Booted up, upgraded from 1.x to 2.0x, added to the existing site. Discovered that devices connecting to that AP only get the Backup Network IP range, traded everything out from functioning AP6 Pro and have isolated to the AP6 itself (?).

Any tips why it would struggle to either contact DHCP or DNS and force clients to the backup network? I’ve literally swapped a functioning AP6 Pro (location, network switch, POE injector, etc all same) with the AP6 and it stops working. Pretty frustrating.

Thanks in advance for your tips.

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IP conflict?

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Thanks for the suggestion. No IP conflict as all devices are configured for DHCP.

My mobile is connected to one of the AP6 Pro with the correct vlan and DHCP range, I plug in the AP6 and wait for it to boot, then disable and re-enable wifi on my mobile. AP shows up in the console with a DHCP-assigned address in the correct range for its’ vlan but my mobile has a 10.188.x address

Only other time I’ve seen the backup network address occur in my journey is when I was having DNS issues, but in this case I’ve checked all the network flows for the AP6 in Firewalla and nothing is getting blocked.

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After quite a bit of troubleshooting I think I’ve narrowed down the issue but it doesn’t make any sense to me.

The first two AP6 on the network function fine. The third is able to get DHCP for itself but not for the clients that connect to it. I’ve swapped them around several times to confirm. I can have two Pro or one Pro and one non-Pro online and operating normally and when I add the third it exhibits this behavior every time.

As one example, I:

  • Connect AP6 (works)
  • Connect first AP6 Pro (works)
  • Connect second AP6 Pro (seems to work)
  • Re-visit the room in the house that has the first AP6 Pro, no longer able to get DHCP
  • Unplug the second AP6 Pro
  • Power-cycle the first AP6 Pro and it starts working.
    No changes to cables, power, location.
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@b94 The back up DHCP server on the APs generally only starts handing out IPs if the primary DHCP pool/server is exhausted or unresponsive. Would you mind sharing what is serving as your primary DHCP server and if you have confirmed you still have reservations available?

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Hi Chase, thanks. DHCP is served up by my Firewalla Gold router (80ish devices), this is the only issue I’m running into with DHCP/availability.

Every AP picks up its reserved DHCP from the server on the management vlan without issue.

Each SSID is a different vlan, all three have available address space (pool of class C for each). Truly puzzling, but I’ll keep digging.

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After extensive troubleshooting and a lot of trial and error, I traced the issue back to a missed vlan config and tagged traffic being dropped, sometimes at the edge switch and sometimes at the intermediary switch.

Sorry for the noise. Thanks to those who took the time to read and/or reply.

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