I have a campus area network with 10 Ubiquiti Stations served by a common Access Point. All Stations receive signals in the -56 to -70dbm range.

Several of the "best" signal Stations hiccup 1-2 times a day with a SNMP -2003 error. It only lasts momentarily and the users don't seem to notice any disruptions, but I am curious what the cause of this typically about 3% dropout error might be.

Is there anything I can do to reduce this issue, or isn't it a real problem?

The fact that it often seems to happen on the best signal radios, has me puzzled.


Article Comments

Hi,

UDP, the protocol behind SNMP ist not designed to be reliable. So it might happen that UDP packets are dropped, either because ther is some small packet loss in the network, or network devices drop them due to load conditions. Even if there are real packet losses, you won't recognize these small drops in other applications as other (more reliable protocols like tcp) just resend dropped packets. You can measure packet loss with a ping sensor. If you don't see packet loss then, you can just ignore these rare SNMP Errors. If the pings also shows a packet loss, then this indicates a (small) problem in your network. This can be a device not operating correctly, a load problem, a cable problem etc. But keep in mind that small packet losses below 1% are quite common in networks.


Oct, 2012 - Permalink