iPad reauthentication issue...

[jason_barath]

we have wi-fi setup at work using a zone director, and use guest access, with a hidden SSID, WPA-2 personal, and shared password. It is also setup so that the user must click on a terms and conditions page before using the Wi-Fi. This authentication expires after 8 hours.

Most of our devices have no issues, but most of our iPads seem to have this issue where, once they go to sleep, and the user turns the device on again, they have to re-authenticate every time.

Is there a way to prevent this behavior?

thanks,
jb

[sid_sok]

Primož Marinšek is correct, we can not stop a client from doing anything.

Once a client tell us that it's leaving the network (deauth) we will do the clean up procedure.

What you can do is to get some packet capture, macbooks running OS 10.8 or later, you can use the wifi-diagnostic to get some packet capture and see if this is the case. You can see the wifi-diagnostics if you hold down the Option key and click on the WiFi icon, on the bottom of the wifi list you will see wifi diagnostics. Once you get there you should be able to take a look at selection option to set the capture on a channel, set it to the channel the iPad is connected on and let the iPad go to sleep and see if it's sending the deauth or not.

[dtsblake_588878]

Sid:

Primož Marinšek also said: "I've captured what my iPad does when it sleeps and I haven't seen any deauth frames."

Side request: Can the ZD offer a global setting that allows the ZD admin to delay "the clean up procedure." for "#####" minutes?

ThX

[primoz_marinsek]

I've done some tests with iOS7.

I've seen that the only time an iPad will send a Deauth frame is when you click on the WiFi OFF button in the Settings.

I've connected my iPAD to a particular SSID and left it for about an hour and there was no deauth packet. Which isn't very nice to the network in general, but it doesn't stand with your observation that it deauths every time it sleeps. But maybe my captures were wrong. Can someone else check this?

Basically what this is telling me is that iPAD really really want to be connected all the time. It's like the Borg, lost if not connected all the time.

RiX, are you shure iPads need to reauth when they sleep or if they go out of reach of your WLAN network and come back later? I've connected my iPad to my guest network also and left it to go to sleep, but I had no problem with the reauth. I don't have grace period set at all.

[sid_sok]

As long as clients are not disconnected after the Grace period and not sending a deauth, it should remain in Authorized state so would not need to be sent to the "login" just the T&C page here. One other possibility is that the client might be connecting to another network (if you have multiple wlan setup) then coming back to the T&C wlan?

This may need to be troubleshot live with support to get to the bottom of this.

[dtsblake_588878]

May try support after a few more work-around attempts.

Are there any iOS and/or OSX ruckus users out there that are not having any problems with disconnects?

Thanks Sid.