Cisco WAPS not associating with Cisco Switchport

[iboyd]

Hi All,

I have Cisco 2960s switches feeding Cisco AIR-3502i Access points centrally controlled. Any reason why some of the Access points associate with the Switchport they are connected to and why some don't?

[iboyd]

The other thing to think about is that the WAPs are on a Trunk port, so LS may not be picking it up. Now if there was someway for LS to dive into LLDP and CDP, then we could probably figure it out.

[Bruce_B · Accepted solution]

When Lansweeper scans a switch, in most cases it also scans the MAC addresses of all connected devices, per interface. These MAC addresses then get compared with other MAC addresses of assets in your Lansweeper database, when a match is found, this asset is displayed on the switch asset page as connected to the interface in question.

If for some of your switch interfaces only a MAC address is listed in the asset column rather than an assetname, this means this MAC address was not scanned as a part of any device in your database. We expect that in your case the missing access points do not have a MAC address scanned for them. If your access points can be scanned through SNMP, you may still need to enable SNMP on the missing ones. If SNMP cannot be enabled it is likely that a MAC address cannot be retrieved for these devices. Lansweeper can only retrieve the MAC address of devices in the same subnet as your Lansweeper server if no open protocols are available (other than a ping).

[Thor]

Bruce.B wrote:
When Lansweeper scans a switch, in most cases it also scans the MAC addresses of all connected devices, per interface. These MAC addresses then get compared with other MAC addresses of assets in your Lansweeper database, when a match is found, this asset is displayed on the switch asset page as connected to the interface in question.

If for some of your switch interfaces only a MAC address is listed in the asset column rather than an assetname, this means this MAC address was not scanned as a part of any device in your database. We expect that in your case the missing access points do not have a MAC address scanned for them. If your access points can be scanned through SNMP, you may still need to enable SNMP on the missing ones. If SNMP cannot be enabled it is likely that a MAC address cannot be retrieved for these devices. Lansweeper can only retrieve the MAC address of devices in the same subnet as your Lansweeper server if no open protocols are available (other than a ping).

In addendum - if the WAP is controlled via WLC; the WAP will stop responding to SNMP requests and only communicate with the WLC. Unless LS implements the WLC Asset.MIB, the WAP will only be 'visible' if it is in either fail-over or stand-alone mode.

[iboyd]

Thor wrote:

In addendum - if the WAP is controlled via WLC; the WAP will stop responding to SNMP requests and only communicate with the WLC. Unless LS implements the WLC Asset.MIB, the WAP will only be 'visible' if it is in either fail-over or stand-alone mode.

Bruce B, shall I make this a wishlist item?

Thor thanks for the knowledge!

-Ian

[Thor]

iboyd wrote:

Thor wrote:

In addendum - if the WAP is controlled via WLC; the WAP will stop responding to SNMP requests and only communicate with the WLC. Unless LS implements the WLC Asset.MIB, the WAP will only be 'visible' if it is in either fail-over or stand-alone mode.

Bruce B, shall I make this a wishlist item?

Thor thanks for the knowledge!

-Ian

Ian,

that would be swell, but might be harder, then it looks.

Cisco currently devides key values between the management.MIB (MAC) and asset.MIB (P/N & S/N) - you would need to query both to build the asset record itself, before you can associate the MAC of the WAP the the switch in the middle, linked to the WLC. Not to mention the nightmare of a remote WAP connected via VPN to a WLC.

Put the poor implementation of the asset.MIB from Cisco for the 55xx series on top of this and you start to wish for SSH access to pull the config to extract all of the nessasary information in one go.

Thor