For those interested, yesterday I worked with a student who had been
complaining of dropping and "taking 20 minutes to get a Skype session
going." Turns out her Macbook Pro was on 10.8.5. I recommended she
upgrade to Mavericks (10.9.5) and let me know if it makes a difference.
I received this email last night from her:
"I have had much better connection, thank you again! Skype and
BlackBoard are working well!"
So needless to say I will be encouraging my Macbook students to make
sure they are up-to-date with upgrades.
-dan
Dan Brisson
Network Engineer
University of Vermont
(Ph) 802.656.8111
dbris...@uvm.edu
On 10/2/2014 8:37 AM, Dan Brisson wrote:
Very interesting b/c we are getting complaints from students with both
Mac and Windows clients. I disabled band select & load balancing and
that seems to have helped, but I still have students who complain that
they get dropped randomly. We're on 7.6.120. I've pressed multiple
TAC engineers about going to 7.6.130, but none of them will commit to
that as being the fix.
We also have only WPA2-AES enabled for our main ssid. Our TAC case is
63665837 for reference.
One thing that I have noticed is that when the students complain of
dropping, it seems be due to the fact that they have roamed from one
AP to another and the roam is taking so long that some clients end up
needing to go through the DHCP process again. The odd thing is that
when I look at the RSSI for the client, it's in the high -60s/low
-70s, so I don't know why the are roaming.
-dan
Dan Brisson
Network Engineer
University of Vermont
(Ph) 802.656.8111
dbris...@uvm.edu
On 10/1/2014 7:18 PM, Britton Anderson wrote:
We've had the same issues regardless of Mac or Windows clients. We
tracked it down with TAC on our controllers (running either 7.6.122.9
or 7.6.130.0) as an issue with both WPA&WPA2 enabled along side
client band select/load balancing. Band select and load balancing are
obviously big ones, but disabling WPA and leaving only WPA2-AES layer
2 security has remediated the problem for us.
-Britton
Britton Anderson <mailto:blanders...@alaska.edu> | Senior Network
Communications Specialist**| University of Alaska
<http://www.alaska.edu/oit> | 907.450.8250
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Ashfield, Matt (NBCC)
<matt.ashfi...@nbcc.ca <mailto:matt.ashfi...@nbcc.ca>> wrote:
Hello
We are seeing some intermittent issues with some of our student
computers (a lot of HPs, but some others) whereby they will be
working away, well connected, and suddenly get the yellow
exclamation mark in on their wifi connection in the taskbar and
lose connectivity. Sometimes they can get back on, sometimes they
have to reboot. We have tried updating drivers and that has not
fixed the problem, although in one case we forced the client to
2.4ghz range thru settings in the adapter and that seemed to fix
the probem in some cases.
The issue is very odd. It appears almost to be location or AP
specific although reports are hard to nail down. Anecdotal
reports suggest more difficulty with non-3702i APs (we have some
3500's and 3600's APs as well) The network is an EAP-TLS network
with client side certs.
As with most student wifi issues, it’s nearly impossible to get
real debugging results, but one thing we have noticed is when the
student is having issues, we’ve seen where the controller is
showing them as associated and authenticated, but the client
machine seems to show that it has an IP gateway and mask but for
some reason there’s no gateway entry in the ARP table of the
client. Release/Renew does nothing. Ping from the gateway does
nothing. Very odd issue. DHCP is provisioned by a central
Microsoft DHCP server (ie, not the cisco device) and we’re using
1 hour lease times. Some students we've seen it happen to are a
result of their laptop going asleep.
I personally tend to lean towards this being a client driver
issue. Problem is, it's nearly impossible to have every student
with up to date drivers in this BYOD type world we operate in. At
the end of the day, we have students who need wifi access and
cannot get on and blaming IT. This is a small subset of users,
but an issue nonetheless.
I have heard rumblings of various wlc options/settings that may
be causing issues and we do have the following list below.
Turning one off at a time is an option I suppose, but hoping that
someone may have some better recommendations here.
- Client Band Select enabled
- Client Load Balancing enabled
- User Idle Timeout set to 5400 Seconds (this is under
Controller/General)
- CCKM enabled
- Session Timeout 36000 (this is under WLAN/Advanced)
- DHCP Address Assignment Required is checked
Any advice/info is appreciated.
Thanks
Matt
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