Higher Education

Hello again all:

We are starting to see an increase in number of clients reporting they are frequently being dropped or cannot connect to our wireless network recently after it had been working for quite awhile (since start of our semester), and so far it appears to be occuring with our Windows 8 users who upgraded to version 8.1. The wierd part is they cannot connect in some locations (they usually report it is their room) but in other locations they do connect fine. We do have a mixture of AP-125 and AP-135 APs on campus and even within a building in some cases, so we are just now trying to correlate to see if it is just a certain combination of Windows 8.1 and an AP-125 or AP-135 that is not working for them. But thought I would throw it out on this forum and see if we are the only ones seeing this phenomenon. Thanks in advance for any ideas you might have troubleshooting this or can give us any feedback if you have experienced this as well.

mike p

What ArubaOS version & controller models?

Sorry about that - 7210 controllers, running 6.3.1.0 code currently

#7210

We had/have an issue with windows 8/8.1;  It sounds similar to yours, on our 802.1x network eduroam users were connecting and then dropping and having difficulty getting online.  A symptom was that they were often asked to re-enter credentials.

 

The solution was to DISABLE 'Enable Pairwise Master Key (PMK) caching.

This is found in the wlan network properties, security tab, advanced settings,  new window 802.11 settings.

---

@MattV wrote:

We had/have an issue with windows 8/8.1;  It sounds similar to yours, on our 802.1x network eduroam users were connecting and then dropping and having difficulty getting online.  A symptom was that they were often asked to re-enter credentials.

 

The solution was to DISABLE 'Enable Pairwise Master Key (PMK) caching.

This is found in the wlan network properties, security tab, advanced settings,  new window 802.11 settings.

---

We were also having issues with Windows 8.1 not connecting.  Disabling PMK fixed it.

Thank you

---

@ngc1300 wrote:

---

@MattV wrote:

We had/have an issue with windows 8/8.1;  It sounds similar to yours, on our 802.1x network eduroam users were connecting and then dropping and having difficulty getting online.  A symptom was that they were often asked to re-enter credentials.

 

The solution was to DISABLE 'Enable Pairwise Master Key (PMK) caching.

This is found in the wlan network properties, security tab, advanced settings,  new window 802.11 settings.

---

We were also having issues with Windows 8.1 not connecting.  Disabling PMK fixed it.

Thank you

---

 

Are you disabling PMK on the client or the controllers?

Hi,

I was disabling it on the client device.

 

~Matt

We had similar behavior.  All of he affected clients were Windows 8.  We would have individual clients that could not connect to an AP but could walk to another floor or building and connect just fine.  We would reboot the AP they should be connecting to and they would then be able to connect.  We spent a lot of time working on the issue.   Two weeks ago upgraded to 6.3.1.1 and so far we have not see the issue return.  Our environment is primarily 104's and 105's.

Brian

If possible, update to 6.3.1.1. There were some bugs in earlier 6.3 versions affecting AP-125s. The APs would eventually run out of memory and either reboot or just stop accepting clients.

 

Rebooting the APs temporarily restored service, but the better fix is to upgrade.

Thanks all, upgrading to 6.3.1.1 tomorrow and see how it goes.

mike p

We upgraded to 6.3.1.1 and it seems to have helped in our case.  We don't have a lot of 8.1 clients yet so not a great baseline for you to go off of.

The new intel driver that came out last week has made my Win 8.1 devices
(AC and N) very stable. I believe it was 16.6.

Good to know. We had a few reports of some WIn8 cients earler in the semester. One solution that appeared to have helped was to disable the 802.11n mode in the client or "downgrade" to a previous driver version (15.x). Advising users to simply upgrade to the lastest driver is always preferred over tweaking client settings.

 

For reference: http://www.neowin.net/news/intels-wi-fi-adapters-connectivity-issues-continue

 

Mike

I just had a coworker in my office with a brand new Surface Tablet running 8.1. He is seeing this issue when connecting to an AP125 but not to an AP225. Both are in the same AP group, on the same controller running 6.3.1.1. There are no per-AP settings.

 

I'm going to do a bit more digging into this, but I was curious if anyone else has seen something like this related to different kinds of APs.