Rocket 2AC Prisms dropping connections

[dougncbp]

Before reading my experiences, see the post below in the UI Community:

https://community.ui.com/questions/Help ... 14caa6c32b

The 8.7.0 upgrade we did happened shortly before all the lockdown nonsense started up, so I'm not sure if heavy usage is a part of this or not. But we are seeing the same thing on all our 2AC's; nearly every customer loses connection and almost immediately re-connects. This is very bad for people using VPN connections to their work. Some can stay up days, while others won't last for more than a few minutes.

We tried backing down several versions, even as far as 8.5.12 as someone in the UI forum suggested. This had no effect. Then, I created a new config from scratch on a spare 2AC that had never been on 8.7.0, and pushed it to one of the units. I hoped that would flush out any config holdovers. But no discernible difference.

Another reason we didn't like 8.7.0 is that it stopped showing customer IP addresses. All of our deployed CPE are M units, and this was a known bug. We just saw today that version 6.3.0 is out for the M series that addresses this issue, but I am very gun-shy on new firmware from UI now.

Is there any possibility that hardware could have been altered somehow with version 8.7.0? What I know about electronics and firmware says no, but anymore I don't know what to believe...

Thanks for reading.

Doug

[dougncbp]

So I reached out to someone else who knows a few things about this. One of the suggestions on the UI forum was to use the "Alternative Data Rate Module", which we already do at all but one location. Then I asked him about the possibility of permanent code being written to the radio, and would not a firmware change overwrite that? Here was his reply:

"Not if they're writing baseband to the radios. Many times that's a one and done process. I'm totally speculating - but I definitely have seen this in cellular devices."

I can't imagine that no one else is seeing this problem. We don't have that many customers on some of these AP's, yet they all are doing the same thing.

[mike99]

Change can also be done at bootloader level and those change will affect any firmware version.

By exemple, the 6.3.0 version change the behavior of the TFP recovery and TFTP recovery is fonctionnal even if firmware have issue since it allow you to push a firmware. So, TFTP recovery is at bootloader level and independent from firmware

[dougncbp]

So we had a spare R2AC that had never seen 8.7.0. The highest firmware it had even been at was 8.6.2, and we put it at one of our problem locations. It didn't solve the problem of connections dropping, but greatly lessened it. We suspect that it was happening before, but not enough to be noticeable by customers.

I have enough older ones to replace all of them, but it will cost me a lot to have them changed out. And we can never update firmware to the latest and greatest after this. Just great...