Last night I took the student's laptop and did a deep dive through wireless diagnostics, at two buildings on my campus and then I took it home and tested it on my home wireless.
First off, the symptoms: MBA is connected to internet, everything looks normal for a few seconds/minutes/hours (usually not hours, though!) Then the macbook acts as if the wireless network is not connected to the internet. Web browser tabs spin and spin, and eventually time out. OR they spin for a long time and then suddenly load. Or suddenly load partially. There is a particular problem with DNS, as there is an "in between" state where I can load a url by name if it's in the DNS cache, and can load a never-before-connected-to site if I use a numeric IP, but the DNS times out if I have to get it from the server. All of this in complicated by the way the internet is set up to retry after failure -- so I get fits and starts of connectivity, sometimes lasting a few seconds and sometimes more like an hour and everything in between.
First set of tests was connected to our office AP215, and I was also on the phone with Apple customer support and my phone using wi-fi assist through the same AP. I ran the WirelessDiagnostics app multiple times, as the network transitioned continuously through random periods of connect and disconnect. Through the entire time the Network Preferences were up, and the computer was reporting a rock solid connection to the AP. Connected through our regular users wireless (mcUsers), and also connected through our partially functional eduroam network. (We have a working SP and can provide access to outsiders, but our IdP is misconfigured and so none of our users can use local credentials. I connected using my personal credentials at another university.) These wireless diagnostics take about 20 minutes a pop to run, and interacting with web browsers I could see that the laptop was sometimes on but mostly off.
At the end of each diagnostic run, it produced a large tarball of reports, which I have only just started to explore. A panel would come up at the end as well and report that the network was not connected to the internet (don't remember the exact verbiage) if the computer had been out of connection for any period of time at all during the test.
Next we carried the laptop to another building. This building has SSIDs for mcUser -- which goes through CPG -- and eduroam -- which authenticates the eduroam way -- just like the building where my office does, and also a third network which is password protected. There the connection would have been through one of two AP135s. I ran multiple passes through the diagnostics, on all three networks. Interacting with the web browser in the background, the network appeared to be up a higher proportion of the time, although it spent lots of time down on all 3 vlans. I had at least one failure and one success (success being where the network stayed up through the entire test, and there was no outage report at the end) on each of the networks.
Next tack was to take the laptop to my house. I have 2 routers, and they have different SSIDs for the different speeds, so total of 4 SSIDs. (Typical home network when your AP doesn't make it through the whole house. I was sitting directly underneath one router, and tested on both SSIDs with that, while I could only see the lower-speed SSID on the other. Like everyone else is reporting, the connectivity was rock-solid on the consumer grade network while it's a total train wreck on the enterprise network. The second test that I ran on my high-speed SSID I got the message at the end indicating that there had been a failure during the test, but I never caught the network down.
Basically still stumped...
-- I have another freshman with the same MBA who has some significant wireless problems the same way, but not nearly so severe. The two girls live across the dorm hallway from each other and are friends and do spend some amount of time together where one laptop is constantly disconnecting and the other only occasionally disconnecting. (yes, their M1 MBAs brought them together!)
-- Both girls have no connectivity problems anywhere but on campus.
-- Both girls have no problems at all when using wired ethernet through an adaptor.
Any ideas gratefully accepted!
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Cathy Fasano
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Original Message:
Sent: Sep 15, 2021 09:51 AM
From: Cathy Fasano
Subject: New M1 Apple Laptops
I am also seeing this -- a particular freshman has her M1 connect to the wireless, shows dns, connects to websites, and then after a short time falls into this cycle of the Network Preferences saying that there is a perfectly fine network connection, but all of the browsers say that it's not connected to the internet. Repeatedly cycling the wireless on and off will eventually get all of the applications to recognize that the machine is on the internet, but within a short time -- a few minutes to maybe an hour -- it crashes off again.
A different student, another freshman who lives across the hall from the first student, has the same model M1. She came in because she was having a different problem, and her network connection is NOT doing the pathological cutting-in-and-out.
I connected the first student's computer to a wire and upgraded the OS from 11.3.1 to 11.5.2 and then loaned her my ethernet dongle and hooked up the ethernet port in her room. I've been trying to get ahold of her to find out how it's been behaving, but she's your typical freshman who thinks that we're idiots because her computer works perfectly on her network at home.
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Cathy Fasano
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 14, 2021 10:05 AM
From: Mark Noack
Subject: New M1 Apple Laptops
We are having similar issues with M1s. Running firmware 8.7.1.1_78245 on Central - about 200 APs.
Two thing happening:
Devices drop off the network, spinning beachball - you have to disconnect from the wireless and reconnect.
Devices dropping out of Zoom and Google meets. This is definitely the M1s, as these users are switching to their phones in the same locations without issues.
This doesn't appear to be affecting the bulk of the devices, but those that are affected have the issues regularly.
Mark Noack
Yarmouth School Department
Yarmouth Maine
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Mark Noack
Original Message:
Sent: May 11, 2021 12:44 PM
From: Ryan Hertzing
Subject: New M1 Apple Laptops
Does anyone have any experience with the new M1 laptop in their Aruba environment? We getting very poor performance with them. Hard to get users to believe their shiny new device is having wireless issues and quickly blame the network. Quick Google mission reveals some really long threads full of similar complaints. Hopefully we can get some mileage out of updating AOS to the newest.
Thanks
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Ryan Hertzing
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