Wireless Access

Currently running AOS 6.3.1.1 on a 7200 controller. I have a dozen or so Apple TV's in the building. Most are running the latest update of their software. I can connect to an ATV and push content via airplay for a short period, times varying between 10 seconds and 20 minutes. I then get kicked off. No warning, no error message, ATV just goes back to the normal screen.

 

I try to reconnect and all I get is "Could not connect to 'Apple TV'"

 

If I disable and re-enable the airplay service under airgroup, I can reconnect again, or if I reboot the ATV, I can reconnect again... until it disconnects me. 

 

There are no disallowed vlans. We do not run ClearPass, so force registration is disabled. No airgroup domains are defined.

 

The ATV shows as an airplay server on the dashboard. My laptop shows as a client.

 

Any suggestions on what to check?

Just got off the horn with Aruba TAC. Apparently, the problem lies with an incompatibility with some apple devices and the HT protocols. Disabling HT and VHT on the ssid that the ATV's connect to corrects the issue.

 

FYI: The Apple TV that I'm using to test is a 2nd gen device, model MC572LL/a. I will test with the higher models as well.

 

I don't like the fact that I have to disable HT for the entire SSID, as I connect more than just Apple TV's through that network. Good news is that because of Airgroup, I can put all the HT compatible devices on a separate SSID and still connect through to the ATVs.

 

 

Hello, can you tell me where I can disabling the HT and the VHT?

 

 

Thank you

Under the radio profiles

 

Call me crazy but it looks like you are disabling that on the radio itself under the default radio.

 

Any AP Group that is using that "default" radio profile would be affected.  This doesn't seem to be under the SSID Profile as you were talking about. 

 

I've seen issues with the ATV's too.  Can anyone verify that this is a good option for a fix?  What type of hit in performance would we take by disabling these two features?

 

Am I right?

Actually after looking.  It looks like I'd lose my 802.11n capabilities.  Not good.  Does aruba have a fix for this other than having us disable these features.

 

I've seen very similar behaviors.

 

 

Okay I think this is where it needs disabled...

 

Sorry, I missed that. I thought you were asking about the radio.

We use appleTV quite a bit, so we already had a  separate SSID set up for it. Our user SSID uses WPA2-ENT, which is "complex" when using an appleTV, so the separate SSID is set to WPA2-PSK and is only for the appleTV's and a few other mobile devices.

 

If I hadn't already done it, I would have made a separate SSID just to isolate the lack of .11N/AC as much as possible, and only moved troublesome devices to that network.

 

 

I do have some appleTV's that work fine with HT. I haven't done a full check, but it looks like only Gen3 and later will work, even with the latest firmware.

 

 

If I can work the time to test, I'll post more specific results.

We are in the same boat here with ATV disconnects and behavior just as the original post. 

 

Aruba: what is the solution?

 

Thank you.

 

Mike

Good Morning,

We are experiencing this same issue.  Is there a fix for it?  Does removing the HT settings work?  I know that we have found that if you hard wire the Apple TV it works better. 

One issue with this is that a third party program we are using is now giving us issues.  When all the Apple TVs were wireless the program would display them so that we could Airplay from our desktops and laptops.  Now that we have hard wired some we found that the desktops only show the hardwired Apple TVs until we disable and re-enable the network port the desktop is on.  Does any one know the CLI to reset the Airgroup server lists.  I think that might have something to do with it.  As all the hard wired ones now have (2) next to their names.

 

 

For me, disabling HT for the SSID that the appleTV's are on worked. I can now connect and stay connected.

 

So far as I can tell, I was only having trouble with G1 and G2 appleTV's. It seems the G3 and G4 devices worked ok.

 

I still get plenty of ghost airplay devices (those with numbers in parentheses) but I think that has more to do with airplay than wifi protocol issues.

 

 

 

We also had these issues, we found them specific to iPad 2s using AirPlay on 2nd and 3rd generation AppleTVs. The version of iOS didn't make a difference either. I called TAC and they disabled HT on our production SSID, and that worked. We finished out the school year like that to keep AirPlay working for our classrooms, but it seems like a huge waste of money to have these really expensive AP135s serving every client at 54 Mbps!

 

I've since upgraded to AOS 6.3.1.8 and re-enabled HT for the summer and our initial testing with an iPad 2 have stayed connected so I'm hoping it's fixed, but can't say for sure. I haven't heard if 6.4 will have any fixes for this either.

 

Anybody else have any luck with this?

We are running 6.4.2.8 and have the same issue with the ATVs disconnecting. We need to upgrade our firmware to 6.4.2.16 to fix the TLS version2 issue for Windows 10 but not sure if that will resolve the ATV issue. Im not keen on disabling HT on our SSID. Any one else have a solution? All our ATVs are hard wired to the network.

You might want to open a TAC case.  There are a number of reasons why Apple TVs disconnect;  part of it could be a genuine ArubaOS code issue; another part could be an RF issue you might be having.  Please open a case so that TAC can try to determine that for you.

We are also having this problem, for more than one year now. We have 130+ ATVs on campus, PCs with Airparrot and MACs. We are running 6.4.3.7, created a separated SSID, disabled HT, left production with default, but still have a few users complaining about this behavior. I currently have an open TAC and have sent numerous logs, and we have our integrators working with us on the case. We also adopted a few best practices for the devices, that we found to be of influence:

 

1- the bluetooth communication between devices need to be off;

2- number of SSIDs on APs need to be the minimum possible ( our case is 2)

3- ATVs need to be restarted from time to time (we have gen2 and 3);

4- Macs need to be restarted from time to time.

 

We also enabled location discovery and active wireless discovery under AirGroup settings, since the MAC OS Airplay does not display more than 99 devices at the same time.

 

Still waiting on a final answer from Aruba though. Service still seems incosistent, and teachers feel frustrated with frequent disconnections. 

 

 

Dear Luiz,

You may also want to check and see if there are any extensions installed on the teachers browsers. I noticed that the Hola proxy or the Youtube Ad blocker also causes and issue with disconnection.

Best Regards,

Mario Fishery
Director of Tech Support

American School of Bombay
SF 2, G Block, Bandra Kurla Complex Road,
Bandra East, Mumbai - 400 098, India.
Tel : +91 22 61313690
Mob : +91 98214 90484
Skype : mariofishery