OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Open-Mesh on GPON Network ~ Major Problems, Please Help!!

The content of this topic has been archived on 7 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hi, we built a brand new 99 room hotel. Zhone GPON network on top of which is our Open-Mesh wifi hardware, about 70 waps total. Problem seems to be that waps are creating major broadcast storm creating mac flapping on the GPON network ports causing major instability across entire vlan. We're seeing loads of BA:BE... mac addresses in the GPON arp table. Open-Mesh says there is no way to turn off the meshing capability of their waps, however, the waps should not mesh if they have a solid wired link, which our waps do have. We're using the open-mesh 6.0 beta firmware which someone at open-mesh suggested we try in an attempt to solve another issue where private DNS resolution was failing for remote subnets. We're not sure if we had the mac flapping issue before the 6.0 upgrade.

We've installed open-mesh at other hotels where instead of GPON there is standard Cisco managed switches, experienced what seems to be the same problem as above and resolved it by disabling spanning tree on the wap ports. With the Zhone GPON network, however, Zhone said there is no equivalent to disabling spanning tree.

We've exhausted every support avenue we can think of aside from this forum. We'll have to rip out open-mesh if we don't find a fix fast. Hoping to find some help here as Open-Mesh firmware is based on open-wrt. Thanks! HELP PLEASE!!

(Last edited by zachb on 24 Nov 2015, 17:51)

I did mods to customize r481, incl. flashing to OM2P-LC. Which devices do you use ? Are you forced to r5cc/r6xx ?

augustus_meyer wrote:

I did mods to customize r481, incl. flashing to OM2P-LC. Which devices do you use ? Are you forced to r5cc/r6xx ?

We're using the OM5P-AN model in our guest rooms, 1 wap in every other room. And 4 MR900 model in our meeting rooms. We were on firmware 585 and now we're on 6.0 (3) which is in beta according to open-mesh tech support. We're not sure if the problems started when we upgraded but that may be the case. Open mesh says we cannot downgrade via cloudtrax. Only by manually flashing each wap individually from a laptop. Very, very frustrating. We don't know if the open-mesh is to blame or if the GPON is to blame and open-mesh support is abysmal. For this reason alone we may have to switch to Meraki as they have an active tech support dpt.

I had some contact with OM myself, when doing my mods, which were more related to the captive portal.
Only real knowledge found at one (the only ?) developer. Should be around here in the forum, I suspect.
>Open-Mesh says there is no way to turn off the meshing capability of their waps,<
Can not buy this, as long as functionality of custom.sh via cloudtrax still available.
But a time-consuming task, in case re-engineering necessary, as I learned.

Would think, offering a payed contract to OM or the developer should solve your problem.

(Last edited by augustus_meyer on 24 Nov 2015, 22:00)

Did you guys have a look at cucumber wifi? Maybe try that before sending them off to the bin smile

OP ZachB,
Did you find a fix for your problem?

I've been running OpenMesh APs for quite a while but only recently started having the same trouble you describe.  I have a mix of 1750's and earlier HS access points that are all registering thousands of MAC addresses that start with BA:BE:.  After about 16,000 registrations my switches get all funky and stop managing some of the more advanced routing tasks and dynamic VLAN management.

I have a total of 5 OpenMesh APs on a small network of about 200 hosts and no more than 50 WiFi devices connected at any one time.  Even when there's no traffic the APs continue to add addresses to the switches.  I'm running Alcatel OS6850 hardware in a stack.  And I'm running the latest OpenMesh/Cloudtrax "stable" firmware.

As a temporary patch I dropped my switches' mac address aging time to a mere 60 seconds.  That has kept the number of registered BA:BE addresses manageable until I find a permanent solution.

Based on the comments in this thread I'm going to try experimenting with STP configuration to see if that helps.  I'm also going to look into applying a mac-address filter on the switch to see if I can block the BA:BE range and then see what that does to wireless functionality.

If you figure anything out please update this thread and I'll do the same.

The discussion might have continued from here.