Apple MacBook Pro dropping wireless connection

[s-pirrello]

Hi,

We have many MacBook pros that are having a hard time staying connected on wireless.  Often times a user can be connected for only minutes at a time.  Our wireless environment consists of 1142s and 3502 series access points.  We use WPA2 Enterprise for authentication via ACS server 5.x.

The Windows 7 machines usually never have an issue.  Can someone please provide some insight.?

*we use Lion OSX on our Macs.

This Discussion has been converted into a Document:- https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-26228    

[Scott Fella]

What WLC version are you on and can you attach a screen shot of your WLAN advanced tab on your SSID?

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[s-pirrello]

Thanks for the quick response Scott.  We're using 7.0.98.0.  I've attached a screenshot of the Advanced tab as well.

[Scott Fella]

By the way... I never use that feature anymore. It's not just Mac Books, but some HP and Dell laptops have had issues also.

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[Scott Fella · Accepted solution]

Disable client load balancing and I bet your problems goes away... I'm 99% sure:). Always got to leave that 1%!

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[s-pirrello]

Can you provide some detail behind this suggestion?  Also, don't we need this option enabled if we wish to leverage the full throughput of 802.11n?

[Scott Fella]

You don't need this for 802.11N. It's a feature that tries to reject the client and have the client try to associate to another AP. Well in high density environments with it seems 10+ clients, this feature causes issues with various devices. Again, I don't ever deploy this in any of my installs anymore.

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[s-pirrello]

I will try and will let you know how it goes.  Thanks again.

[Scott Fella]

Let me know if it works for you.

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[Scott Fella]

Were you able to verify if disabling that feature worked?

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[s-pirrello]

I think it's very early to assess the impact.  My wireless is 100% better but I'm seeing an oddity where getting my 1st wireless connection for the day takes several minutes.  Once it's established it works great, but when I arrive to the office and open the lid it takes roughly 5 minutes to get a wireless connection.  I grabbed a packet capture and exported the logs from the WCS via the troubleshooting tool.  Are you interested in looking at this?

[Scott Fella]

Sure... Disabling that feature will not have any impact on what you are experiencing and must be something else. You might try to disable client band select to see if that helps your clients associate better.

Is your environment high user count. I see this type of behavior in education where many users try to login to the network first thing in the day.

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[s-pirrello]

Funny you mention the "Client Band Select", it was recommended to me to enable it when I attended training.  As far as high user count, I will say we have don't have too many users associated early in the morning.  Overall, we have about 900 WIFI clients but only about ~50% is associated form.

Attached are the logs and packet capture.

[Scott Fella]

It's varies... Depending on the client device, the client still decides what band it wants to use. This feature also tries to 'force' devices to associate on the 5ghz, but I have also seen many devices that don't connect on the 5ghz and prefers the 2.4ghz and at times we also see client devices not associating well because of this feature.

Testing helps, but doesn't cover everything in a production environment.

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[Scott Fella]

By any chance do you have both wpa/tkip and wpa2/aes enabled on the SSID?