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Apple OSX devices getting no internet while connected to Ruckus APs

unknown

We have an environment with 36 R510 APs spread among 12 floors with 2 ZD1200's on the back end. We notice on a daily basis that random set of Wifi users cannot browse the internet or get disconnected in the middle of a video call even though they have full bars for Wifi. This is an issue because the building is 100% wireless. We have turned off DFS channels, and tweaked power levels accordingly to minimize overlap. It seems that only Apple users are effected. Are there any known issues with Ruckus and Apple devices?

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unknown

We see this issue too. Would love to understand a good set of techniques to diagnose such issues.

unknown

Hi, I had similar issue in the past and found out that problem was caused by situation that there was many DHCP servers in the network. In that situation, Android devices worked normally, but iOS devices couldn't connect. You mentioned that you have two ZDs, so it reminded me to that case.

michel_rougemon

I have the same issue, with only 1 ZD1200 managing my WiFi network...

unknown

Bump to this issue. We identified that this affects Mac clients and not Windows clients.

Turning off roaming between APs and removing "dashes" in SSID temporarily solves the issues.

Do Macs handle roaming poorly with Ruckus? Can symbols in SSIDs affect Macs?

unknown

Hello, I had the same problem, Windows users ran smoothly and Apple devices connected and disconnected randomly.
I solved this by changing the encryption options, choosing only AES instead of TKIP+AES in the Wlans configuration. He hasn't given me any more trouble since then.

greetings.

Antonio

unknown

Just posted a similar problem, we already use just AES. Our quick fix is to reboot the affected AP as it seems to suddenly impact on just one. Wondered whether it was some kind of attack from the user devices which are BYOD but the logs seem remarkably empty of any useful info, all I see is the reboot we trigger.

unknown

Bump on this, seems like there are issues with Macs in particular. Has nothing to do with symbols in WiFi but roaming features intended to move devices to best coverage seems to “stall” Mac devices instead. What we observed are Macs that are connected at full strength (5 bars), will time out (stay connected), and either re-associate after a few minutes or user has to disconnect and reconnect manually to get internet again. Only Macs though, any idea why?

itdept_head_me

We had MASSIVE problems with this , specifically macs & the WIFI chips and R500 /510

we updated all macs to the latest os & then the rucus to the latest firmwares.
turned off 2.4 and now we can roam over 3 floors.

We found that sometimes the macs WILL NOT let go of a distant AP, they fight to maintain the shitty signal even if a new ap is closer, so you might be stuck tied to a 50% sig and there is a 97% sitting over u.
cleaning out all the stupid "remembered" connections in the mac control panel goes a long way to helping.

it seems more of an issue with badly placed wifi points.
Then you get the nonsense with "dual points" where the mac swaps between 2.4 & 5 depending on how it feels, seems swapping frequency AND AP does not cleanly maintain the connection.

then there is the issue of "sleep", if you are in a meeting room and tied to a WIFI & sleep, tehn come out of the room and relocate AP's... the mac just swallows packets, turning the wifi on/off fixes it.

oh and YES .. symbols in the names WILL affect the mac, mac follows the RFC exactly.
strange chars, may not pass the unicode values correctly "_-#$@" etc
you will see the same with naming macs & DNS/ DHCP names.

unknown

Wow this relates to our circumstances to a tee.

I am just dumbfounded how others , perhaps in bigger environments (schools, stadiums, etc.) that’s use Ruckus devices and support Mac users tolerate such poor interoperability.

unknown

ditto on our corporate environment. This problem started from zone directors and now we still have it in Smartzone 100. Impossible to replicate but obviously everyone having the issue. All Ruckus has been recommending is controller upgrades and minor tweaks like ofdm only turn on and bss min tage adjustments which also changes with the change in Rep everytime. Now sure what else to do at this point. Even when the issue was happening we got on the call, but if there is no traffic passing, there is gonna be nothing on the capture obviously. But again, turn wifi on/off problem is fixed.

itdept_head_me

Yep...
I spent 4 months on this back it 2016, initially i was sorry I purchased ruckus, but then it sort of came together.

I got really angry with apple, becasue if you go to "sys-info" ->wifi
and make a note of the : (they stripped a lot of the info out....),

Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x134)
Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (7.21.95.178.1a2)

you will find macs from EXACTLY the same family with specific revisions of the BC chipset
BUT with different FW versions!!!!!, ESP. if they are from different years of production.

when you update a mac it DOES NOT update everything at a system level, apple DOES NOT keep the internal FW's updated and in sync. (no FW is NOT available)

So you might have two 'identical' "MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)"
but the damned BC FW is NOT the same!!!, how the hell can any system be reliable & stable , using such poor attitudes.

We.... me .. apple.. ruckus, identified a specific issue with sleep, where RCs was "closed out" due to time out, but since the mac was woken from sleep, it still considered the "link" to be alive..
we clearly saw packets going out from apple kit and disappearing into the "ether"
Much of this should have been fixed in later os updates of both sides.

Now my kit in factory location is fine over 3 floors of production area (110M long)& passes off nicely as long as it cannot see distant WIFI points it tied to previously & moved whilst sleeping.
but now users just toggle the wifi if it gets "stuck" (we have seen AP hand off stuck with other brands of kit as well)

as long as my mac does not sleep... i can freely wander about our sites and no handover issues.
and currently i have about 160 devices on WIFI... in this 1 location.
I think it is tolerated because:
1. the mix of devices is less legacy
2. Due to pixel masterbation... kit does not sleep so much.

unknown

So the outcome is to turn off 2.4 Ghz on the AP's and/or Zone Director?

unknown

Turning off 2.4 GHz helps but doesn't fully solve the issue. We turned off 2.4 GHz last summer and have had less complaints about slowness (from connections to distant APs), but still sometimes have to have mac laptops turn airport off and back on to re-connect. iPads and iPhones support 802.11r and don't seem to have the same issues.

help_desk_fkaer

We're seeing this same issue again with the latest 10.1.1.0 build 26. I have an open case with Ruckus but again since it is so intermittent and our campus is so large (131 AP's and growing), I'm having trouble nailing anything down. High Sierra "seems" to be stable but with over 1500 devices, getting everything up to date is a nightmare.

unknown

Hi, did you get any further on your case?

unknown

Hi, did you get any further on your case?

help_desk_fkaer

Issue is persisting across 10.0.x and 10.1.x builds. Ruckus is working with Apple on the issue I opened a case about. Ours is more specifically tied to 802.1x wlans. WPA wlans are not seeing the issue.

unknown

We have 410 R710s on campus using two virtual smartzone controllers. We have a large number of district owned devices as well as personal devices on our wireless network. We made the decision when we installed the network that district owned devices would be on 5GHz and personal devices on 2.4GHz. In other words, all of our district owned Windows laptops, Mac laptops, and Chromebooks would connect at 5GHz, they cannot jump to 2.4. For our Mac and Windows laptops we use 802.1x and onboard them using Cloudpath. Chromebooks are a hassle on 802.1x so they are on a separate SSID using WPA2-PSK.

All of our MacBook Pros are running High Sierra and working quite well, even with roaming. We are using the latest firmware with our vSZ controllers. Now, I say working quite well since end users are not complaining. We have a lot of MacBook Pros so I am assuming if they were not working well we would have heard end user complaints.

unknown

I should have mentioned that at 5Ghz we are on a fixed channel/fixed power plan. This was all done using a physical site survey. At 2.4 we let the APs change channels and power levels if needed

unknown

I have an open case with Ruckus yet again since it is so irregular and our grounds is so extensive (131 AP's and developing), I'm experiencing difficulty nailing anything down

unknown

I have an open case with Ruckus yet again since it is so irregular and our grounds is so extensive (131 AP's and developing), I'm experiencing difficulty nailing anything down

help_desk_fkaer

So I
decided to do some more research and see if a similar issue has been reported
to other wireless vendors. I came across this, which is quite old but the issue is very similar. I have made the suggested
changes of scenario 1 on all three of our controllers and will see what happens when the users
return from the holiday.

https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless-mobility-documents/apple-macbook-pro-dropping-wireless-connection/ta-p/3116976

unknown

Any update to this change? Would love to know the outcome.

help_desk_fkaer

No this does not seem to have helped. I have also deployed a vSZ and migrated the AP's of affected users and that difference has not helped either. Ruckus claims that Apple has yet to determine the root cause from the Apple Diagnostic files we have sent them.

unknown

In our case we got this suggestion from technical support

"Could you please enable the Proxy Arp and Increase the
Inactivity Timeout to Max 1000 on the WLAN and see if this helps fix the issue"

This change fixed the issues for our iOS clients.

unknown

Same here, 400 macs fleet and 2k more windows fleet. Just Macs on Catalina are affected. Tried everything.

michael_brado

Hi Thaigo,
Please open a case so we can look at logs. Catalina wasn't available in 2017 when this thread was started.

unknown

Hello Brado,

Are there solutions for the same issue for devices on High Sierra and Mojave?

help_desk_fkaer

So here's my latest findings on this issue.

I recently migrated from a single node vSZ to a two node cluster running 5.1.1.0.598. While working with support to get the licenses migrated we chatted about this issue. Two things came out of the conversation which I am in the process of implementing.

First, We switched from Proxy (controller) based RADIUS to AP based RADIUS. I had opted against this in our original deployment years ago because I did not want to create ~200 RADIUS Clients on each RADIUS server. Turns out, if all your APs are on the same subnet, you can specify that subnet CIDR as the IP and cover all APs in a single entry. Then you configure your WLANs to use an AP RADIUS auth method.

Secondly, 5.1.1.0.598 apparently has a known issue in which the RADIUS service restarts unexpectedly. This is supposedly resolved in 5.1.2. I am planning a maintenance window to perform this update after I let the AP auth changes settle.

unknown

Any documentation on how to setup Wlans to use AP Radius auth?

help_desk_fkaer

Navigate to Services + Profiles\Authentication. The first tab is Non Proxy.
Create your RADIUS config
Add the IP subnet to your RADIUS servers with the same Shared Secret
On the WLAN, disable the Authentication service Use controller as Proxy toggle to switch and select the AP Non proxy server you created.

unknown

Doesn't seem like this option exists on the Zone Director

unknown

Have you had a fix yet for the Catalina issue? We are having this on test installs of Catalina.

unknown

Hi everyone,

Any news about how to solve the issue with random WiFi disconnects on MacBooks? Newest Catalina OS version 10.15.2 gives the same user experience as the previous one 10.15.1. -Dissatisfying as of february 2020. Obviously it does not help to open a case with Ruckus. I see that it has been lasting in a couple of years with iOS pc-es. Any other experienced professionals who can help with this issue? Recomendations? Contacts? I am eager to solve this case once and for all. Thanks in advance!

unknown

We are getting zero disconnects on our Ruckus networks with MacBooks. We do have our network divided with all school districts owned laptops on 5GHz and guest devices on 2.4GHz. This prevents band switching, perhaps give that a try. We are using vSZ and R710APs

unknown

Hi David,

Are you using WPA2 or Enterprise for authentication?

unknown

What model Mac laptops are having the issue with Catalina? We noticed that our 2018 and newer models work fine but older models are the issue. Seems to be hardware problem for Apple as Ruckus is not the only wifi vendor with this complaint/issue and yet Apple is zero help.

unknown

WPA2-Enterprise. We have all of our Macs on boarded to our 802.1x network (EAP-TLS) using Cloudpath. We push out the settings for this using Jamf and it works great

unknown

David,

Are your macbooks 2018 and newer? And do you mind if i ask what radius implementation you are using?

unknown

Hi Kevin,

Are you also on Enterprise authentication?

unknown

Yes

unknown

Our Cloudpath server acts as our Radius server. We are using EAP-TLS and we have Macbooks that are between 1 and 5 years old all running High Sierra or Mojave

unknown

This is good information David and Kevin, let me see how i can use it for our environment. Thanks

unknown

Good question Kevin. I will check out MacBook models at the customer tomorrow. Shall give a further notice.

unknown

Useful recommendation David. Will give it a try. We really do not have frequency division on this site. So it is both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Although customers are not complaining about the speed, so I assumed that is working fine on this site. We are using vSZ and R510 APs.

unknown

I am curious as well whether it has smth to do with Authentication type. Any difference between SSID with preshared key or Secure SSID with Certificate for a device?

unknown

David, do you use AD, Radius, preshared key or DPSK for user authentication?

unknown

Thanks for sharing your experience David! I wonder whether any of your users have Catalina OS and what is their experience? We use as well 802.1X EAP, WPA2, AES and Cloudpath Radius onboard database for authentication, vSZ and R510 APs. I have High Sierra and do not experience disconnections on site, although specifically users with Catalina 10.15.2 OS and previously 10.15.1 experience disconnections twice a day as a rule. This is the difference. Catalina is a key point here:)

unknown

Kevin, did you open a case with Ruckus on this issue or Catalina users just learnt to switch wifi on, each time it disconnects?

unknown

We worked with Ruckus support for months and never found the actual root cause. We did immediately notice that all our 2019 Mac's worked without issue on High Sierra and Catalina, but older Mac's still had/have the issue. Our engineers created a script for the touch bar so they could just hit a button and it would disable and enable wifi. Horrible, but it worked for them as we phase out replace older models. Neither Ruckus or Apple ever confirmed that it was a Apple issue but it clearly has something to do with the hardware used in the older laptops.

unknown

Hi, I'm also experiencing this problem.

The WiFi works flawless for every device except Apple OSX devices (diagnostics performed on Catalina OS 10.15.3). We are experiencing poor roaming and random disconnects with no automatically reconnect on MacBook OSX devices.

We run R500/R510 APs on vSZ 3.6.2.0.222

It feels like I have tried every config there is and with no results whatsoever.