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    

[jonmo2578]

Cool.. thanks for the reply Scott..

yes, we disabled "Client Load balacing " last week but we are still experiencing issues with Macbooks reauthenticating after coming out of standby mode..

Are you still having problems with delay on the 802.1x authentication or has that now good too ?..

Did you change the timeout timer or disable the Client Band selector option too ?

Ive actually opened up my own discussion on this I didnt want to barge my problems onto yours !..

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3506833#3506833

Any opinions welcome..

thanks.

Jon.

[Scott Fella]

Try to extend the EAP timers.

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[George Stefanick]

If your client is in standby mode it is safe to say its not passing traffic. If its not passing traffic then by default the WLC should delete your client record in 300 seconds (5 minutes). This can be changed of course. Look under the controller TAB. Idle session timeout.

Just my 2 cents.. something worth testing

[sxepjensen]

Hi Scott,

We have been experiencing similar issues, but also including Apple IOS devices and occasionally Windows systems...   however, we have two SSIDs with both client load balancing and client band select enabled, and we have only been experiencing the issues on one of the two SSIDs.  I will most likely try disabling the client load balancing, but in reading through this discussion, this comment caught my eye since we do have both WPA/TKIP and WPA2/AES enabled on the SSID which has been experiencing the issue.  I was hoping you could expound upon what sort of issues this might be causing?

Thanks a bunch!

[s-pirrello]

I would try disabling Client Load Balancing and Band Select.  Once we did this it cleared up much of our troubles.  Also, there is a bug with Intel driver 14.x that is resolved in 15.x so you may want to research this too.  We had to upgrade several of our client machines with 15.x and since then that helped tremendously.

Another issue we had on our end was that our APs were not setup in HReap groups.  We enabled this feature as a best practice and haven't looked back since.

[Scott Fella]

It's really the client that has issues with both encryptions in the beacons being sent. I have seen many iOS devices freak out when I have had both configured. One other thing is that 802.11n requires wpa2/aes or open. WPA/TKIP is not supported in 802.11n. Most devices do support wpa2/aes and removing wpa/tkip shoul not be a problem. If you do require both, then create another WLAN with a different profile name but same SSID. One WLAN will be for wpa2/aes and the other WLAN will be for wpa/tkip.

Thanks

Scott Fella

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[sxepjensen]

Thanks Scott and s-pirrello,

I'll be discussing these issues with some of my coworkers and probably scheduling up some changes.  I'm hopeful about this resolving the rather befuddling issues we've been seeing for quite some time!  Thanks for your time and input,

-Eric

[s-pirrello]

Scott, you are a champion!  Disabling "client load balancing" has resolved the issue.

[Scott Fella]

Glad you have it working. Since I have a Mac, I find out the hard way:)

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[Vinay Sharma]

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

Thanks,

Vinay Sharma

[GNOC-Caraustar]

Hi All,

We are facing same issue with Apple users. Suddenly  users drop from the network and only way to reconnect back is to restart  the user machine. When user drops the SSID singal strength is full.

The option "Client Load Balancing" is already unchecked.

Could you please help/suggest with some solution.

Our product detail:

WS-SVC-WISM-1-K9

S/W Code : 7.0.98.0

[Scott Fella]

Well that code has been deferred so you might want to upgrade to the latest 7.0.x.

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[GNOC-Caraustar]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the information but could you please let us know if there is any known buy in this version that is leading to the issue.

[jonabaker]

I am also seeing this problem and running

AIR-CT5500-K9-7-2-103-0.aes code on my controller and the latest version of OS on my mac.  I have disabled client load balacing and client band select on the SSID in question.  It's  a WPA2 8021x active directory authenticated WLAN. Does anyone have any ideas for me.?  I see the issue on certain MacBookPro's and certain MacBookAir devices but not all.  There is not an issue with signal strength as the AP is near enough.  The AP's are  AIR-CAP3502I-A-K9 models.  Thanks for any hekp you can give!

[Scott Fella]

First off can you verify that you are only using WPA2/AES not TKIP also. Also disable session timeout on the WLAN advanced tab and see if the problem goes away.

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