Going nuts with Orbi 950 WiFi authentication(?) issues (every 2 weeks)

You should be using the IoT specific network for any and all IoT devices. And not the guest network. Guest Network does have a limited least time and was never meant for long term use with IoT devices. 

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NutsWithWiFi wrote:

Good Morning! 

I have an Orbi 953 (Costco version of Orbi 960 with a few differences), along with 2 satellite devices. I have around 90 devices connected across two SSIDs, let's call them "main" and "main_guest". 

 

My issue is this: 

a) I have around 40 IoT devices connected to my guest network (mostly wiz wifi lights)  that every once in a while (1-2 weeks) are not accessible via their app

b) I have, after a lot of fiddling figured out that when it happens, randomly a bunch of devices are not able to get a DHCP IP address on main_guest. I've validated this by running wireshark on my guest wifi and I see a bunch of DHCP requests that don't get resolved. 

c) What seems to "always" fix the issue is if I toggle the authentication mechanism of main_guest. If its set to WPA2-PSK[AES], I switch it to WPA2-PSK[AES]+WPA3-Personal[SAE] or vice versa and boom - all devices connect immediately and get an IP address (password is same)

 

I'm confounded why this issue keeps happening. Almost always, the issue shows up on my IoT devices first (as I can't control them) and sure enough, switching the auth method seems to work. No amount of router rebooting helps.

 

FWIW, I suspect this same issue seems to happen on my main network - a few months ago my IoT devices used to connect to "main" and they would often not be accessible. I never really triaged this much then - I just assumed it was a network load issue and moved several of them to guest. When it started happening again is when I started diving in.

 

More details on my setup:

HW RBRE950

Firmware: V6.3.7.10_3.3.3

1 Router + 2 satellites

IP Address:  10.0.0.1 

DHCP: On

 

- 20/40 Mhz coexistence is OFF (read in many places turning it on may cause IoT connectivity issues)

- Preamble for both 2.4/5 is automatic, power is 100%

- No access control

- 2.4 GHz channel. Auto (almost all of my IoT devices use this)

- 5GHz channel 48

- 6Ghz channel 69

- Main is set to WPA2-PSK AES + WPA3-Personal SAE

- Guest I keep toggling whenever I see the issue as mentioned above

 

Any hints would be super useful. Thank you.

 

 

My setup:

 

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