Change of IP address of ZD while APs are connected ...

Summary

Customer wants to change IP address of the ZD without minimal interruption to the AP connection to the ZD. The APs IP addresses are statically assigned and so is the ZD IP. The APs are going through a Microtik 750.

Question

What's the best way of changing the static IP address of my ZD without affecting AP connectivity much?

Customer Environment

Customer wants to change the IP address of production ZD.

Resolution

This document describes a way to change the IP address of the ZD if the ZD is a standalone ZD (not smart-redundant ZD). This described a 2 step process from the ZD GUI.

1. First thing to do is to change the IP address of the ZD's limited discovery and change the Primary and Secondary addresses in the Configure / Access Points section of the ZD, put the primary IP address to the current IP address of the ZD and the secondary to address that you will be changing the IP address to:

User-added image

This change gets proliferated to the APs and to confirm if the APs have taken the change, you can do a ‘get director’ from the AP CLI.
This is what the command shows before the change
rkscli: get director
------ ZoneDirector Info ------
Primary Controller   : n/a
Secondary Controller : n/a
DHCP Opt43 Code      : 3

And this is what the AP shows after the change is made at the ZD:
rkscli: get director
------ ZoneDirector Info ------
Primary Controller   : 10.9.50.36
Secondary Controller : 10.9.51.31
DHCP Opt43 Code      : 3
The primary/secondary command is a soft change, it gets sent to the APs and the APs do not need to reboot for the command to take effect.

2. Then change the IP address of the ZD in the Configure / System GUI:

User-added image

Keep in mind that if there’s an IP address change that also the Gateway/DNS Servers/ and other network information might need to be changed/modified as well. Make sure that the new ZD IP address/subnet is pingable from the side of the gateway where the APs reside. This can take some planning from the network side.
Again, this change is for a non-smart-redundant ZD and for a smart redundant solution the change would be different.

Article Number:
000004259

Updated:
May 06, 2021 12:04 AM (over 3 years ago)

Tags:
Configuration, System Network Management, ZoneDirector

Votes:
3

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