Allied Telesis AT-WA7400/EU - Manual (Page 47)

AT-WA7400 Management Software User’s Guide
47
Cluster
Formation
A cluster is formed when the first AT-WA7400 Wireless Access Point is
configured. (See “Configuring the Basic Settings and Starting the Wireless
Network” on page 37.)
If a cluster configuration policy is in place when a new access point is
deployed, it attempts to rendezvous with an existing cluster.
If it is unable to locate a cluster, then it establishes a new cluster on its
own.
If it locates a cluster but is rejected because the cluster is full, or the
clustering policy is to ignore new access points, then the access point
deploys in standalone mode.
Cluster Size and
Membership
The upper limit of a cluster is eight access points. The Cluster web
administration pages provides a real-time, visual indicator of the number of
access points in the current cluster and warn when the cluster has
reached access point capacity.
If a cluster is present but is already full, new access points are deployed in
standalone mode.
Intra-Cluster
Security
To ensure that the security of the cluster as a whole is equivalent to the
security of a single access point, communication of certain data between
access points in a cluster is done using Secure Sockets Layer with private
key encryption.
Both the cluster configuration file and the user database are transmitted
among access points using SSL.
Auto-Synch of
Cluster
Configuration
If you are making changes to the access point configuration that require a
relatively large amount of processing (such as adding several new users),
you may encounter a synchronization progress bar after clicking Update
on any of the AT-WA7400 Management Software web pages. The
progress bar indicates that the system is busy performing an auto-synch of
the updated configuration to all access points in the cluster. The
AT-WA7400 Management Software is not available during the auto-synch.
Note that auto-synchronization always occurs during configuration
updates that affect the cluster, but the processing time is usually
negligible. The auto-synch progress bar is displayed only for longer-than-
usual wait times.