topic Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway in Wireless Questions and Best Practices

Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

martin_kulp — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:01:36 GMT

We've been having a strange issue for months. Some Mac clients on the Wi-Fi lose connectivity to the gateway intermittently for a few seconds to minutes. We noticed this when users began complaining that they were "disconnecting" from Wi-Fi, but after setting up multiple pings, it's clear that they are losing connection to the local gateway as pings to other machines on the Wi-Fi network are fine. This mostly involves R710s with a virtual smart zone, and various Macbook clients.

I managed to capture traffic with Wireshark during one of these outages, and the pings go out from the client but are not answered by the gateway (SonicWALL in this case). I find it hard to believe this is a problem with the gateway as there are never problems with LAN clients (Windows or Mac), or Windows clients on the Wi-Fi. It's just the combination of Mac and Wi-Fi that leads to this. I've experimented with different SSIDs, passwords, different encryption, NO encryption, 5Ghz, 2.5Ghz, and on and on. No obvious connections.

It's not easily reproducible, and seems to consistently follow one or a few users around before going away and then affecting a different user or group of users for a while.

I'm stumped. Has anyone else experienced this?

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

monnat_systems — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:52:49 GMT

see here for more

https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruckuswireless/topics/osx-clients-connected-to-ap-but-not-passing-...

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

martin_kulp — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:04:18 GMT

Thanks. Looks like the issue is not resolved in that thread...?

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

monnat_systems — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:18:45 GMT

yep... being told that issue lies at apple end.

in the meanwhile try some alternate fix mentioned here and the link below

http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/22/fix-wi-fi-problems-macos-sierra/

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

martin_kulp — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:29:47 GMT

Thanks! And to that article I have only one thing to say: ugh.

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

jamie_walmsley — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 15:56:51 GMT

If this is the same issue as detailed in the thread that Monnat Systems linked, then I was under the impression that it was fixed by Ruckus on their side in 9.12 and Apple in 10.12.3 (So ive been told by Ruckus) however Ive yet to finish testing it here, will know more in the next few days if Im still seeing problems.

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

martin_kulp — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 16:01:44 GMT

Thanks Jamie. Is that ZoneDirector 9.12? We are using Virtual Smart Zone. Any news about that?

Re: Mac clients losing connection to the gateway

jamie_walmsley — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 08:02:26 GMT

Yes Martin ZD 9.12. Im running 9.13 here now and still seeing some Mac issues (but not as many as I was prior to upgrading the Mac OS devices to 10.12.3) so i'm not entirely convinced it is fixed - got my ticket re-opened with Ruckus. Thats with R700's on a ZD3K running 9.13 and Mac OS client devices running 10.12.3 or higher.