Trouble with some Aruba IAP-305 access points at home

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Skip to the bottom if you don't want to read a story

 

Backstory (not important):
So a while back my beloved Nighthawk (I believe it was an R7000, don't have it in front of me to verify) just stopped working suddenly. WiFi went down across the house, and no amount of rebooting, reseting, unplugging, etc. Would bring it back. I couldn't log into it and it wouldn't broadcast or route, I couldn't ping it, nothing. It would start to boot, and then just sit like it was frozen...

So I cried and sulked and moved the cabling for the switches from the nighthawk to the craptastic modem/router/AP/switch/dildo from spectrum. I turned on the wifi, and configured the SSID's and keys to match my previous configuration. And my family continued with their streaming and internet fun. I wasn't happy with the situation, but I didn't want to go spend $200 on an exact replacement as that R7000 just wasn't powerful enough to serve the whole house anymore.

 

Backstory (continued, more significant stuff):

My R7000 broke, I got my lucky hands on some Aruba IAP-305's. Took some time to learn to use them and configure them, but I've only ever worked with consumer networking gear. My first go around, I thought I had everything perfect, I setup 2 SSID's to mimic my previous configuration (so I wouldn't have to update networking on all the wireless devices), placed one in my office, and the other on the opposite side of the house. (both connected with a cable of course, screw wireless backhaul). 

2 days later, we're getting ready to host a party, and I setup a 3rd SSID for a guest network because why not? It's so easy! 

Friend arrived the night before because he's from out of town, His phone was on our main wifi but his Nintendo Switch was on the new guest network. All seems good, until he wants to cast YouTube from his phone to one of the xbox's. The Xbox was wired. And it wasn't showing up as something he could cast to on his phone...

I recognize I must've done something wrong, that ARP broadcasts aren't working, so I try random nonsense in a panic, and break the whole wireless network.. and I didn't have a backup configuration file, because I was full of myself. So I reset both IAP's, setup my 2 main SSIDs, and just try to let things be for the night.

 

My House/setup:

• 3300 sqft single story
  • Modem and router are in my office, which is not centrally located.
  • Wired Networking throughout most of the house with switches in each room. All wired terminates at my office.
• Wired Devices
  • multiple Xbox's
  • multiple PC's
  • 1 smart TV
  • A Hue bridge
  • Wink HUB
  • 2 printers
  • and of course a bunch of dumb (I believe they would be called L2) switches.
• Wireless Devices
  • multiple Chromecasts
  • multiple smart TVs
  • A lot of Amazon Echo Dot's
  • Chamberlin MyQ smart garage door opener
  • Smart phones
• SSID's
  • Because my old setup had "networkname-2.4G" and "networkname-5G", I recreated those, but set the SSID broadcast to hidden because that was dumb to begin with, I also set them to both support 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
  • I created a third SSID "networkname" that broadcasts and has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios enabled.
    • Basically all 3 SSID's above are configured identically, except the old ones have their SSID's hidden because I don't want to use them anymore, but am lazy and don't want everything to still work while I'm slowly migrating devices to the new SSID
• Hardware
  • 2 IAP-305's (wired)(in future, I want to put one in each individual room, because why not? I have access to 6 total, and I've only deployed 2)
  • That craptastic spectrum modem/router/AP/switch/etc device. I'm using it as a modem and switch/router currently, AP is disabled.

 

TL;DR/Actual Request for assistance:

My lack of experience with enterprise gear, and all has put me in a position where I get to learn a lot of new cool things. The downside is my house is now in a state of half working half not, and my wife is getting frustrated with it. I've managed to semi-resolve most all of the issues, but I don't know if my solutions are at all correct, so I'm looking for help, if anyone recognizes any of these issues, or if I'm doing something obviously wrong... I'll post my current configuration tonight when I get home if it would help.

I'm primarily looking for some advice on what settings I need to configure so the IAP's work without hickups at my house and all my wireless and wired devices can ARP to eachother and interact without a problem.

Problem List:

• Half the echo dot's have suddenly started having trouble connecting to the network. I had to reset them last night and move them to the new SSID, then they started working
• A different echo dot has had some issues with being very slow to respond to requests, I'll say "Turn the lights off" and after 30 seconds, it will indicate the job is done, but it will be a full 2 minutes before the lights finally turned off. 
• All my chromecasts dropped off the network, and refused to work. I had to factory reset them, but then they kept failing to let me add them to the network because they couldn't authenticate.. I eventually learned I had to uninstall and reinstall the google home app on my phone and suddenly I could set them up again. 
• One of the wireless smart TV's is very very slow to buffer video. It's within spitting distance of the primary IAP-305 (I think it's called the virtual controller? I have it set as main.), but has intermittent issues with buffering hulu. 
• The MyQ garage door controller is in the garage, opposite side of the house from the primary IAP, but connects to the primary IAP-305 instead of the one that's closer to it. It shows in dashboard that it's got a weak signal, but I don't know how to force it to connect to the closer access point. 
• I'm still having casting troubles. Both wireless and wired devices will show up and drop out of the list of devices one can cast to randomly and frequently.
• Because the IAP-305's have a fairly strong broadcast, in some cases where I'm moving from one side of the house to the other, my phone wont switch which AP it's connected to. I know this because I'll have 4/5 bars of signal on my phone, instead of 5/5. Now this is the smallest of my problems. But I'm wondering if there's a way to decrease the broadcast power so it doesn't overlap so heavily and maybe that will help with the roaming/handshake/passover.