I have problems with the 2960’s Radius and DHCP features and am still some problems after reapplying firmware and reconfiguring from scratch.

The setup is the 2960 as the gateway, with two WAN’s, one as a backup.
This is connected to a switch. There are then various PC’s connected to the switch along with 4 Vigor access points, 2 x 700’s and 2 x 710’s.

The access points use the 2960’s Radius server to authenticate wireless connections.
I am binding IP’s to MAC addresses as I have different IP ranges setup with different rules in the firewall for different devices. All devices apart from the access points are configured to use DHCP rather than static addresses.

This setup has been working fine for months with iPhones, laptops and tablets with no problems.
After an additional user was configured for a new device problems seemed to have started a few hours later.

Some PC’s were not getting internet access (this turned out to be that they were no longer being assigned an IP address) my first thought was that DHCP had stopped working. Defining the correct IP address for each PC (ie the one that matched in the IP MAC binding table) allowed the PC’s to get back online. Note that all PC’s are using wired connections , so there is no Radius authentication happening.

The wireless devices were still not connecting properly even with a static address defined.
I configured a secondary SSID on the access points that did not use Radius authentication temporarily and wireless devices were connecting but still only if a static address was also defined.

I had also by this point tried removing the new user and IP binding that had been setup prior to this problem starting, this made no difference.

I next configured one of the access points to act as the Radius server and pointed the other access points and the router to this for authentication. This then allowed the wireless devices to connect properly using Radius, though I was still having to use static IP's. So it appears both the Radius and DHCP services were not working correctly.
Unfortunately I could not locate a backup of the original configuration to restore the settings of the 2960

I tried backing up the config as it was, updating the firmware then restoring the config, this made no difference.
I then made a note of all settings, updated to the latest firmware and was having problems with even logging back onto the router.

Currently I have it configured with firmware v1.0.7.1 and all of my config manually recreated after restoring factory defaults.

At this stage DHCP is working again, but Radius is still not authenticating anything.
I have checked my settings over and over and cannot see a problem, even using simple passwords.

I am wary of updating back to the newer firmware in case of issues.

Is there any way to see if the Radius service is functioning correctly on the 2960 at all?

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Why are using old buggy firmware is my question. The firmware you are using was so unstable I stopped using the 2960 and bought a Cisco unit instead. I think it was around 1.0.9 that it ceased being a doorstop.
My suggestion install latest firmware and then start again.
If you have a config backup it may work but it's risky.

I did install the latest, but was having trouble even getting the unit to respond so I tried the old version out of desperation. When everything was working before the DHCP/Radius problems it was only a couple of revisions behind the latest firmware. In fact it was a beta version from DrayTek they sent me to try and resolve a problem with email alerts not working which never really got resolved. I just managed to create a workaround for that. The worry is I have no idea why this has happened so can't be sure it won't happen again.

I suppose I should try and update the firmware and see what happens as you said.

Other than that, a door stop is sounding like a good idea!

annoyingly draytek don't do rst files for 2960. That way you could a complete wipe back to default. A ticket to draytek ???

Well yesterday the DHCP seemed to have stopped working again as even wired connection were not getting assigned an IP. A reboot and everything was OK again. This was also on the 1.2.1 latest firmware version.

The PIT, your last post implies that a factory default doesn't actually clear everything to defaults, is that the case? That would be quite bad in my opinion

I am going to raise a support ticket now anyway. This has already cost way too much time. It's a shame there is not more ways to see what is going on, either by a user interface that supplies more information or command line options.
The syslog doesn't appear to be showing much of anything, I was hoping to at least see the access points negotiate with the router to show that they are using it for the Radius authentication but I can't see anything when I restart them. I think I have seen such info in the syslog before but i'm not 100% sure, if so then there is clearly something not functioning now that was before.

It should but it would be nice to flash it with default values. It would be interesting too see what draytek say.