Apple Device Roaming

[jeremy_west_564]

I am having a problem with frequent disconnects on apple devices when signal strength is great. In looking into this further, I noticed that the apple devices in question are roaming at an alarming rate. This is happening across iPad, iPod, and MacBook platforms. For example, I looked at an apartment with an iPod touch that was roaming every 30 seconds or so. There is a Win7 laptop in the same apartment that has not roamed one time. I have about 40 Apple devices on the network and similar behavior is happening on 70% of them. I have about 40 other devices on the network and this is not happening with any of them that I have looked at so far. What is more, the Apple devices are roaming out from a nearby AP to an AP several hundred feet away with a few buildings between them. The user is not leaving the apartment but the device is roaming to APs throughout the campus, even APs it either should not see at all, or just barely.

Any ideas? Has anyone seen anything like this before?

[dtsblake_588878]

Consume with a grain of SALT:

Apple Blocks Lawrence Lessig's Comment On iOS 7 Wi-Fi Glitch
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/s...
destinyland writes "A glitch in iOS7 has cost "a significant number" of Apple users their Wi-Fi access, according to ZDNet. But they also report that Apple is now censoring posts in their "Apple Support Communities" forums where users suggest possible responses to their loss of WiFi capabilities (including exercising their product warranty en masse). "We understand the desire to share experiences in your topic, 'Re: wifi greyed out after update to ios7,'" read one warning sent to Lawrence Lessig, "but because these posts are not allowed on our forums, we have removed it." Lessig — who co-founded Creative Commons (and was a board member of the Free Software Foundation) has been documenting the ongoing "comments slaughter" on his Twitter feed, drawing attention to what he says is the Borg-like behavior of Apple as a corporation. Lessig "is now part of an angry mob in Apple's forums who upgraded to iOS 7 and lost Wi-Fi connectivity," ZDNet notes, adding that as of this morning their reporter has been unable to obtain an official response from Apple."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

shared via http://feedly.com

[jeremy_west_564]

As some background to my original problem, I am using a ZD3000 with a combination of 7363 and 7762 APs (74 total).

This does appear to be resolved now for us. We did a number of things in trying to resolve it and I can't say for sure that it was one thing or another. These are the steps I took:
1) enabled 802.11d support
2) turned off client load balancing
3) statically assigned 2.4GHz channels and turned off background scanning
4) Upgraded from 9.3.x to 9.4.3.0.16 (I know that is old now)
5) Adjusted transmit power on 2.4 radios to try to reduce interference (but there really wasn't much present to begin with)

Upon doing these things, the system stabilized and has remained stable for the last 4ish months. Hope this helps.

[dtsblake_588878]

Worked OK for me for 2 hours. This is better than the original 10 minutes. Client was idle the last 30 minutes of the 2 hours. Idle and grace each are set for 120.

[dtsblake_588878]

JW:

Still good at your site? Let us know if you upgrade to most current general release firmware and results.

[bill_burns_6069]

I'm having excessive roaming issues with macbook air laptops.
I've got a pair of ZD3000s running the latest 9.6 code w/ about 60 APs.

In one building/complex I've got 20 zf7372 APs.
One client there has roamed over 250 times today and there's a noticible impact on connectivity every time the client roams.
(sometimes the client renews it's lease w/ the DHCP server, sometimes it doesn't bother but resumes talking on the network anyway)

This user has an AP directly outside of his office, but the macbook air continually associates to 2 other APs on different floors.

In the past I've had iOS users comment that they're continually prompted if they want to connect to the (only available) SSID.

I've also seen situations where a windows7 laptop jumps back and forth between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz radios of the same AP. The windows machine will do this for some time before getting confused and staying associated to one radio but without connectivity.

So far Ive turned on:
smartroam 2 (used to be "5". did this to prevent "stuck client" issue)
802.1d
ofdm-only
bss-minrate
regionalization and available channels are set to "optimize for performance"
Channelization is 20 for 2.4Ghz and 40 for 5Ghz.

turned off:
background scanning

load balancing is enabled.

Still looking for a solution.