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Forum Discussion
Does Storm Control affect Wi-Fi authentication?
| Product Name | FS726T |
| Firmware Version | V2.0.1_14 |
| Protocol Version | 2.001.002 |
We could not find the exact model we have in the model list above, so we list it here. We have a Netgear FS726T Smart Switch (84-1b-5e-84-ae-70) in a school environment. We enabled its Storm Control and set its threshold to 512K speed for Unknown Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast in hopes of improving our Internet speed, but it caused our Wi-Fi device users to not be able to authenticate and log in. The Wi-Fi devices that had previously authenticated and were left running in the classrooms kept their connections, but any new device (i.e. from a student entering the classrooom) that had to authenticate failed. So I tried increasing the bps threshold from 512K to 2M, then 4M, then 10M, with no luck. Finally, a bps threshold setting of 20M seems to allow the Wi-Fi device users to connect to our Ubiquiti hotspots (nothing was changed in thier configuration). So does limiting the speed of inbound unicast, multicast, and broadcast packets affect Wi-Fi device connectivity? Should we just Disable Storm Control?
Thanks
3 Replies
Welcome to the community! :)
You may try to disable Storm Control then observe.
The access points that are connected to the FS726T switch are they NETGEAR devices? If yes, what model/s are they?
Are there VLANs configured on the FS726T switch?
Regards,
DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team
Yes, the problem goes away when Storm Control is turned off. The 20 WiFi access points are all Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR's. And no, we aren't using a VLAN, although that's an idea. This whole thing started with the thought that to improve the Zoom online meetings that the 60 some teachers were doing (via Ethernet), Storm Control seemed like something to try, as we have large numbers of studentsusing Wi-Fi, but that turned out to be a bad idea in retrospect because the students could not connect for most of the day before we figured out what was causing it. All very interesting why Storm Control limits users from establishing a link to the Wi-Fi hotspots.
Thank you for your reply.
And no, we aren't using a VLAN, although that's an idea.
Since there is no VLAN configured in your existing network, I would assume that its most likely one big flat network which is bound to have a lot of broadcast and multicast traffic.
The traffic that is needed for the clients to authenticate gets held up when storm control is on and most likely the handshake between the wireless client/s and authenticating device (if 20 APs most likely a controller) does not complete.
Having separate VLANs for WiFi clients would help.Regards,
DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team
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