Higher Education

We have a strange issue that I just wanted to see if anyone else has seen.  We had several students say their PS3 wasn't working on our network and it worked fine at home.  We did some troublshooting including opening our firewall up to all traffic to a test PS3.  Everytime the PS3 booted, it would work for between 1-10 minutes and then the network card would just turn off.  No link lights or anything.  We tried both wireless and wired on the PS3 and the result was the same.

 

Our final testing was all done with the PS3 wired.  We wiped the PS3 and just connected it via wired so it would have no settings for our wireless network.  The same issue happened where the network card just shutdown.  No link lights.  This was done on multple switches to eliminate any issue there.

 

We were troublshooting other issues on our Aruba system and disabled some settings.  We later noticed the PS3 no longer had issues and was able to connect to our WIRED network just fine now.  The network card never shutdown. 

 

We narrowed the setting down to ARM Over the Air Updates.  It only seems to happened to older model PS3's.  We tried both older firmware and the latest on the ps3.

 

We are able to replicate the issue just by turning this setting on/off.  It is crazy that this issue happens when we are not even wireless!

 

no ota-updates

 

Anyone else see this very interesting issue?

 

We are running 6.3.0.1

 

 

We have seen the same problem, however have not gone that in depth to troubleshoot.  Our symptopms mirrored yours.  We are currently running 6.2.1.3

 

Have you opened up a case on this?

 

Regards,

 

Scott

No we have not contacted TAC about this.

We have 2 users here reporting same behavior of their PS3, we are also on 6.2.1.3 currently.

Mike

Hood College

Please open a TAC case for this.  This is been seen in a few spots.  The NIC on the PS3 is all in one...meaning that RF and wired go through the same processing...it's really bizarre to comprehend but a wired connection can still be affected by RF.

 

 

The issue that we been seeing is that a non-slim PS3 with the latest version v4.46 is not able to see any of our SSIDs when the device performs a scan .

Our production APs are currently on AOS 6.2.1.3

We tried the following :
- turned off band steering
- turned off dropped multicast/broadcast on the VAP
- turned off HT and just use legacy a/g
- manually added the SSID
- reset the PS3 to factory settings
- tried connecting to a non-aruba AP ( linksys ) , but the PS3 is not able to detect those either
- tried an AP on AOS 6.3
- tried connecting the PS3 on the wired side and didn't not work

We haven't opened a TAC case yet but I think I'm now

After disabling the arm OTA updates on 6.2.1.3 the ps3 non slim was able to see our SSIDs , very interesting stuff.

Thanks for sharing this information.

I have opened a case for this

When a resolution is found, could you please keep us updated here?  It would be greatly appreciated!!!

Victor:  Were you able to resolve your problem with the Sony PS3s?

 

What was the resolution?

 

Steve

We are experiencing the exact same issue.  I have a case open w/ TAC.  Will update when I learn more.

 

We are seeing a similar problem with the older PS3. The strange thing is that when they bring it to the helpdesk where there is an AP 225 they connect with no problem but when they go back to their room they can't see the AP right next to them. 

Rosie, what rev of code are you running?

6.3.0.0 until the next maintenance window.

I've upgraded to 6.3.1.0 and I still have a problem with older PS3s not being able to connect. I am having one dropped off this week to test disabling OTA updates. What are the ramifications of doing that?

 

If ARM OTA is disabled, you are not going to see super impact since ARM passive scanning will still work and this is what allows the the AP's discover each other.

 

But there may be some impact on the way intf_idx are calculated, but that will be quite small.

Hello All,

Just looking for a show of hands here.  How many of you opened TAC cases?  If a TAC case was opened, is this issue resolved?  Was it proved to be Aruba WLAN related or Sony related?  If someone could please provide a TAC case number, I would like to go and read the case notes so I can look into the issue further.

Did anyone file a TAC?  Trying to determine the issue resolution.

Have you or anyone else resolved the issue of PS3 systems dropping off the network?

I have an open TAC case but the quick fix for the older PS3s was to disable the over the air arm updates on the rf/arm profile in our dorm ap configurations.

For what it's worth I had the same problem on my PS3 at home. It was on the network one day (and older apple AirPort Extreme) and not the next. I would scan for wireless networks and it would not see any wireless networks. I'd plug in an Ethernet and it would show a link on startup and it would go out after a bit. The ps3 didn't think that a connection was there. Tried everything under the sun to fix. My main suspect was a ps software update but while google would show lots of peeps having similar issues, they were spread over different os versions. Resetting settings had no impact.

Finally fixed by complete restore to factory settings (wipes put everything). When came back up saw the 6 or so wireless nets no problem.

It is likely just a play station problem, but I am running an Aruba RAP on the network. Wasn't connected to it, but there you are.

 

David Morton

University of Washington

We had several of our users who were having the trouble and who were willing to perform the factory reset try but to no avail. We've had XBox users successfully fix their problems with a wipe but with this particualr PS3 problem it didn't help our users.

We run 93Hs in our res. halls, and I finally got an older model PS3 to test with and what I have noticed is the PS3 prefers wireless over wired, so at boot it will look for a wireless network to connect to effectively disabling the networking on the PS3 when being used in the res. halls.  In the lab setting, however, when I only have one 93H up the PS3 works fine, but as soon as I bring up a second the PS3 network gets confused or overwhelmed or something and from a few seconds to a couple of minutes the network on the PS3 shuts down and will not function.  Take that second 93H down and within a few minutes the PS3 is fine again.

 

This is the response from TAC and disabling the ARM OTA updates does solve our problem:

 

"The PS3 (CL917784871-CECH-L01) that we have been working with falls under first generation and its version(s) are CECH-LXX, CECH-KXX and CECH-MXX. WLAN NIC in older PS3s(First Generation) do not handle OTA frames which will be "unrecognized frames" correctly.

 

Ideally, the PS3 should IGNORE these frames and carry on, but it results in connection drop.

 

As it’s a client inability at this point to handle such frames, we have successfully worked around this issue by disabling OTA which would be a potential fix as such for client side issue.

 

a) Under the ARM profile for 802.11a & 80211 g, please disable the option ARM Over the Air Updates & let me know if it resolves the issues being seen. 

 

Disabling ARM OTA updates will not have much of a negative impact as “PASSIVE SCANNING” would still work and will help AP's discover each other.

 

The ota-updates option allows an AP to get information about its RF environment from its neighbors, even the AP cannot scan. If this feature is enabled, when an AP on the network scans a foreign (non-home) channel, it sends other APs an Over-the-Air (OTA) update in an 802.11 management frame that contains information about the scanning AP's home channel, the current transmission EIRP value of its home channel, and one-hop neighbors seen by that AP. 

With that being said, When ARM OTA is enabled, the Aruba AP will send OTA updates that are Aruba proprietary packets which can only be interpreted by Aruba AP's and will be bogus frames for other clients or devices. 

802.11 Broadcast management frames will be processed by NICs but anything with subtype 15 should be dropped by most NICs. In order to understand why the older models of PS3 hang when they receive this subtype of management frame, it may be helpful to follow-up with Sony. We have not seen any other client devices behave this way. Also, it seems like something got fixed in the newer model of PS3's since the issue is not seen there. Do you have a case open with Sony by any chance? 

Some older PS3 models shut down their NIC when receiving OTA management frames form the AP. This seems to be client-specific issue."

I'm glad we have a response from Aruba on this finally, however what confounds me is that a year ago this was not a problem.  I'm sure we have quite a few of these on campus, and it's only been reported since the students returned this fall.  Is the "Over the Air Updates" a feature which has been added to the code base within the last years time frame?

Yup

- Ryan -

I didn't see it on our 6.1.3.2 code so maybe a late 6.2.x.x but definitely in 6.3.0.0.

Is anyone else using 93H APs in the deployment?  Disabling the OTA updates did not work for me.

 

We are also using the 93H and have seen the same PS3 problems. I can also say that I have tried disabling OTA updates and it did NOT seem to fix the problem. I have been unable to get any students to troubleshoot further. 

I called Sony to see if they were aware of the issue, and if they would be willing to support. You can guess with the PS4 out that this is not a priority.

bkay, was there any official response from Sony?

Has anyone else tried to contact Sony?

Unfortunately, they're like Apple and enterprise networks do not exist to them.

I tried a few months back and they said it was not the PS3.

I'm still debating on how I want to explain this issue to students.  I'm really hesitant to disable the OTA component of ARM because, it seams to me, that when we upgraded to the 6.3 code, we had substantial performance improvements.  Could that be explained by something other than the OTA component?

I turned ARM OTA off just in the dorms at a customer without issues.

Should be testing the disable OTA in one Building Group shortly...

Disabled the OTA component and student is happy now.  No unusual reports of side effects so far.

We received the same response.  They said they made no changes from the "fat" model to the "slim," but something changed because "slims" work and "fats" don't.

We were having similar issues at Sacramento State with the ARM feature enabled on Aruba access points with PS3's 1st Generation.  Turning the Aruba ARM feature off resolves the issue where the wireless and wired network adapters completely drop connectivity/disable themselves.  Turning the ARM feature off might not be a longterm solution but this definitely verifies that this is an issue with the PS3 OS/hardware.  Does anyone know the PS3 OS version this started to become a problems in 4.5x?

We turned off over the air (ota) which fixed our issues with ps3.

Wes

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