WAX 214 laptop Clients dropping "IEEE 802.11: disassociated" - Solved !!

ihavealegohead · ‎2022-05-27

After investing many hours on this forum and others I found a solution that worked for me

Problem:

Multiple laptops (Dell/HP) disassociated from the WIFI

Hardware:

WAX214 - AX1800 WiFi 6 Dual Band PoE Wireless Access Point

Current Firmware Version:2.1.1.2

Error:

WAX214 daemon.info hostapd: ath1: STA [random mac] IEEE 802.11: disassociated

Resolution attempts --

I tried changing channels. One channel, multiple channels, low, high, nothing worked

Set static IP for the WAP

Used different Authentications

Used no authentication (worked but not practical)

Disabled client limits multicast

Disabled client isolation, vlan isolation, l2 isolation

Disabled Band Steering

Changed the Group Key Update Interval to diff values and disabled

Removed all WAX 214's from the service except the one I was next to

power cycled

^ nothing worked (except no authentication)

I didn't try a Radius server, but there is one on PFSENSE and that was going to be my last step.

Solution --

This was the last thing I tried because it makes no sense whatsoever :

I disabled any Access Point that had BOTH 2.4 GHz and 5GHz.

Note --- If my laptop was connected to Access Point A where only 5GHz was selected, but Access Point B had both selected, the laptop still "disassociated". Both access points can have only one Wireless band selected, even if your laptop is not connected to it.

During testing I also had situations where my Android would not authenticate to the WIFI at all. I tried to enter in the password again but failed. I ended up having the change the WPA3 password to something else and then change it back for the android to connect.

Very buggy software NetGear. You can do better.

Hope this helps you - if so give it a thumbs up, maybe NetGear will notice.