Issue with random users and mobile devices not able to connect to the Aruba

[Muckrak3r]

Hi all,

Just a heads up I am extremely new to supporting our Aruba.  Our controller supports 11 different Aruba 105 AP's.

Recently I had a user approach me and ask why the wi-fi suddenly was "broken."  I then checked with one of our Windows admins and he could get access on his phone, but not his laptop.

The issue they are seeing, is they can see the wi-fi network being broadcast and they attempt to connect to it.  The next step in our authentication process is to load up any web page in the browser, and that normally loads up the Aruba page where we enter our login credentials.

I have a phone and a tablet, and always get normal behavior.  There are several users however, that do not get to the Aruba log in web page.  So they are effectively connected to the wi-fi but not authorized so no data transfers.

Any tips would be appreciated on troubleshooting this problem.  Thanks in advance!

*I have verified none of the affected users have static IP's entered into their wi-fi settings.*

[andrea.consado…]

you've captive portal auth?

all clients get ip from the same dhcp server?

if not all dhcp server pass dns server informations?

[aalap22]

It seems that you are using captive-portal authentication.

Please check for OCSP. Go to aruba support site and search for OCSP under KB section for details.

(http://support.arubanetworks.com/Default.aspx?tabid=111&loc=https://kb.arubanetworks.com/cgi-bin/arubanetworks.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?p_sid=RuDnfWKk)

Ask user to try different web browsers. 

Try typing https://1.1.1.1 in the web browser instead of google.com or yahoo.com. It will isolate the DNS related issues.

[andrea.consado…]

i also see this issue with firefox but with last firefox version seems to be fixed

[Muckrak3r]

Thanks for the initial replies all.  We will  be attempting a reboot of the controller after business hours tonight to see if that takes care of it.  As far as browsers go, we are seeing the issue on Windows laptops, Android phone, and iPhones.  Several different browsers being used, but the same result.

I use Opera on both of my devices and it works fine.  Will update again after reboot tonight.

[jkobulyar]

I'm kind of new to this forum but maybe I can help you out, or at least narrow down that your problem is or isn't the same as my problem.

With certain makes of network adapters, the one in specific that comes to mind is the Realtek 8188(I think the model number is right)

The issue lies in that the network card stays awake long enough to connect to the wifi but then after about 8 seconds goes into "sleep mode"

What you can do to verify if this is or isn't the case is keep a constant ping going to your captive portal page

ping <your captive portal ip address> -t

If after about 8 seconds you start to get time outs, go to the power preferences and set it to high performance, this should prevent the network card from entering sleep mode. There is a check-box to prevent this from happening in the network adapters but I don't think that option does anything.

[Muckrak3r]

The issue was finally discovered.  We actually run multiple WL networks, and multiple levels of access depending on which network you connect to - via each AP.  It turns out, one of our WL networks was assigning proper IP addresses for the VLAN we were using,  but then for some reason it was handing out DNS entries related to other WL networks and VLANs.  It was quite strange and took one of our network guys a couple days to sort it out.  (actually, it took him about 15 minutes to sort out once he had ALL of the symptoms information.)