I've seen this discussed a lot both here and on other wireless forums (Ruckus, etc.), but I haven't been able to find any good info on pinpointing the issue or what the solution(s) might be. I know every environment is different - but is there a good way to troubleshoot this issue or are there any gotcha's I should be aware of with Macbook's as wireless clients?
The Issue:
The newer MacBook Pros in my environment (2015 models are only affected it seems) lose all connectivity over wireless in areas with very good conditions: coverage, low channel utilization, low noise floor, etc. This happens when roaming, it seems - although the users seem to be sitting in meetings or at their desk working often when this is happening (could be client match or something else causing the roam). I notice that the MacBooks are sticky and don't like to roam until the connection is almost unusable when I try to recreate the problem.
In most cases, I notice that users at their desks who have the issue and call IT for support are still disconnected when the tech reaches them. To get them reconnected, they've been having to forget the network and set it back up. For users who have issues in meetings, they will often walk their laptops back to the service desk, which is near me, and I always hear them complain that they were disconnected from the wireless network... then they look at their laptops and say "OH WAIT! I'm connected again." Then they go back to their meeting and don't seem to have issues again until it comes up again - which is not 100% consistent for each user, but enough that we receive the same type of complaint almost daily from at least one user.
I'm currently testing on a MacBook Pro 2015 model with OSX Yosemite 10.10.3. I will ping an address on the network and walk around the building. I seem to drop a packet when I roam between AP's 80% of the time (the dropped packets are correlated with the logs on the controller). The other 20% of the time, I will lose the connection for 10-30 seconds.
On the AP, I've compared auth-tracebuf, user-debug, and ap client-trail for a roaming event that causes 1 packet to drop vs one that causes 30 seconds of loss of connectivity and they look identical for the most part. station down to station up + all the events to auth success / association with the AP (including every line in the debug for that event) happens within the same second in both scenarios.
I ran the wireless diagnostics tool on the Macbook though, and it alerted me to the loss in connectivity. Unfortunately, the results are: "Review Wi-Fi Best Practices" and make sure you have your wireless router's channel set to auto. Useless.
For the controller, I'm running a 3400 HA pair on 6.4.2.6. Auth is TLS + cert cn check via ldap. No inner eap (all unchecked).
If someone knows what might be going on, please do tell.
If not, please give me an idea of what to do next to troubleshoot. I know this is most likely a client side issue since everything else works just fine on the wireless network - but I figure someone else has to have run into the same issue and resolved it!
Thanks!
PS - 85% of the Aruba support cases I open end up with me running around in circles for weeks gathering data, making changes, etc. and then finding the answer myself somewhere on these forums - so that's not the advice I want to hear.