sebMonster

Author: Seb M

Ghost 5Ghz

We’ve encountered a substantial issue with our Aruba deployment, I suppose one of the major faults of using many of the default settings/profiles with the AP615 devices we are using (thankfully it is not affecting the AP635). The flaw is that the Flexible Dual Band: Automatic profile for the APs has been making it that we have no 5Ghz network being broadcast on ANY of our 1000+ AP615 devices. While troubleshooting I pieced together that manually setting it to 5GHz and 2.4GHz the APs then broadcast the bands they are supposed to.

After spending a bit of time reading about the settings, it is my understanding that this issue of the ghost 5GHz may have been of our own doing as it is meant to broadcast 2.5 and 5 OR 6G based on user “requests/ability”. I believe that when we disabled 6GHz in our WLAN configurations it may have caused a conflict with the Flexible Dual Band settings

We currently have a ticket in to rectify this as disabling 6GHz from the WLAN ssid SHOULD remove it from the options provided by the “Automatic” Flexible Dual Band.

September 18, 2025
Thinking outloud

This is just meant to be blog for me to document our transition from Cisco to Aruba, and kind of like a working notebook and place for me to think out loud.

We’ve very recently, in the span of 2 months, transitioned 80+ sites from being a Cisco/Dell network, wireless and wired respectively. 1300+ AP, and roughly 600 switches. While the transition has been done in record speed, tons of speed bumps have been hit at that same speed. From missed AP installs, misconfiguration of AP, lack of foresight on our MSPs behalf.

The first complaints we got was how poor the coverage was compared to our previous 2702i APs. That was temporarily alleviated by increasing the radio output. By default the Aruba was broadcasting at around 8-12dbm. Previously (due to poor/sparse AP coverage)our Cisco APs were broadcasting between 16-22dbm. As such, we’ve increased to match what we previously had. Over the course of the year we will be deploying another 2000+ APs to our sites with the goal of removing 2.4Ghz altogether. But as we deploy the APs per school, we can lower the minimum and maximum dbm output.

September 16, 2025

Author: Seb M

Ghost 5Ghz

Thinking outloud