Monitoring and Troubleshooting
Wireless Connections

Clients not getting IP address

5min

When Wireless/Wired devices are unable to get an IP address while trying to connect to a network, please validate the below steps:

  • Check the end device network settings and verify whether the device is configured to obtain IP address from DHCP server.
  • If issue is only seen for Wireless clients, check whether the issue is specific to any AP, location, SSID/Segment.
  • If the issue is only with Wired devices, confirm whether there is no issue with the ethernet cable between end device and Switch and check by connecting to a different Switch port. Also verify whether the issue is with a specific subnet/Segment.
  • Verify whether the device is passing the authentication. For Wired devices, check if the device MAC address is Approved under Settings -> Access Management option. For Wireless devices, it should not be in the Deny list under Access Management and it should pass the SSID specific authentication as well.



Nile portal: Access management
Nile portal: Access management

  • Verify whether the issue is for a specific device or for all devices connecting to the SSID/network.
  • Login to Nile portal dashboard and confirm if DHCP tile in Infrastructure section is showing green.
Nile portal: Dashboard
Nile portal: Dashboard


Also in Devices tab, we will be able to see the number of devices failing to get IP from DHCP server:

Nile portal: Devices info
Nile portal: Devices info

  • Check whether Devices tab in Nile portal shows any error message as below:
Nile portal: Devices info
Nile portal: Devices info

Nile portal: Devices info
Nile portal: Devices info

  • Verify device details page of the reported device by clicking on the username/MAC address to see the Events and check if there is any error message is there like below.

"DHCP Server Unreachable" error below shows that there is no response from DHCP server (which can be due to multiple reasons like the DHCP Discover/Request is not reaching DHCP server, DHCP Server is not responding to the Discover/Request packet from client device, intermittent network issue, etc.).

Devices page:
Devices page:

  • Login to the DHCP server and check if DHCP server is receiving any Discover/Request from the reported device. We can check the DHCP server logs, leases or check by running a packet capture at the DHCP server side. Also check if enough IPs are available in the DHCP scope for the specific client subnet.
  • If DHCP server is not receiving DHCP Discover/Request packet, take a capture at the NSB uplink and check if NSB is sending out DHCP packets to the DHCP server (Head End in NSB should act as a Relay agent for the Nile clients and should send unicast packets to the DHCP server).

If clients are sending out DHCP packets and if you are not seeing DHCP packets out of NSB, please contact Nile Support team.