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]

Bill Burns:

We are having similar roaming problems related to Macs.

Has Ruckus provided you any help?

Others:

Has any Mac / Ruckus customer ever have the roaming issue working regularly and successfully...maybe with an older version of ruckus firmware or older OSX/iOS?

[spikes_it]

I have one site that is pretty solid. ZD1100 with AP7363s - all current versions (and current OSX). I wish I could clone that at my second site 🙂

[bill_burns_6069]

Tech Support recommends capturing data from the client machine w/ wireshark. (along with WiFi headers)
..and simultaneously using another wireshark instance along w/ an AP as a remote capture interface.
The user with this problem was out for the day so I just spent *my* day in his office trying to replicate the problem with another macbook air but with no success.
So I have no useful data to send back to Tech Support on this problem.
Will keep on trying.

[dtsblake_588878]

Smartroam at "1" did not help us.

Bill: Any more help from ruck tech support?

[bill_burns_6069]

I'm working w/ a good tech-support rep now. Got all my tickets transferred to this one guy. The roaming rate (at least for the macbook air machines that I've been watching) has gone down to around 10 times a day instead of 100+ times a day. I'm not sure what/which change to attribute the improvement to.
I'm still not sure about iOS/android devices.
When looking at logs, It's hard to tell the difference between a device w/ an excessive roaming problem and a user that moves around all day.