Wireless Access

We are having issues in our office with Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks not being able to connect to Aruba wireless. We have a few other models of Chromebooks that do not seem to be experiencing any issues connecting. When the issue occurs, the Chromebook shows Failed to connect to network 'NETWORK NAME': DHCP lookup failed. The SSID we are trying to connect to is WPA2 PSK /AES, but we have also tested without any encryption, and the problem still occurs. We are using a W-7240 and are running OS 6.2.1.3. We have a mixture of Aruba 105s and 135s in our environment. The issue occurs on both APs. Our ACL is allowing all IPv4 and IPv6 traffic through.

I am opening up a TAC support case soon, but was just wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar with the Samsung series 3 Chromebooks. We have large number of Dell and HP laptops, iPads, and other models of Chromebooks that are not experiencing any connection issues.

We are also planning on updating our OS from 6.2.1.3 to 6.3.1.2 in the next few days. Is there any chance these Samsung series 3 Chromebooks will connect better with a new OS?

Thanks,
Steve

Hello!

Does the Chromebook connect or it doesnt?

Im not really clear on that.

When you say it does not connect i would think that it wont connect as it would not appear on the client table of the Wireless controller.

But then you said later that dhcp lookup failed, which make me think that it connect but never got an ip address

If it happens with some chromebooks and not to others, mm can you try updating the drivers of those wireless cards? i mean if that exist on the chrome OS  :) i never used it though....

cheers

Carlos

The connection issue is intermittent. I currently have three Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks on my desk and none of them are able to connect. I also have two Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks which are connecting fine. We also have around 4,000 clients (mixture of HP/Dell XP & Win 7 laptops, iPads, iPhones, Android Phone, and other devices) connecting as we speak that do not have any issues. The problem is narrowed down to this particular model of Chromebook. They have all been updated to the newest Google Chrome OS and I do not think it is possible to update wireless nic drivers on a Google Chromebook. I was just wondering if anyone has experienced an issue like this using a Samsung series 3 Chromebook.

Thanks,
Steve

SOrry can't help but I do know that the Samsung Tab and Galaxy series have issue connecting back to the WIFi after the equipment is left there for a while. When you bring it back up it will show you authentication error even if you are using an open SSID. Please check with Aruba TAC for more infromation may need to do a sniffer trace to see what are the packets being send out in the air.

I am currently connected to a Acer Chrome Book C720 and using it to reply this thread. I see no issue connecting them using PEAP -mschapv2. You may want to see if it is really connection issue or just can't get any IP address.

After doing some rigorious testing, we have determined that the Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks have issues connecting to 20 MHz channels on the 5 GHz spectrum. When channel bonding is enabled on the 5 GHz, the Series 3 Chromebooks connect without any issues. However, our other Chromebooks models (Samsung Series 5, Acer C720) experienced the same connection problems when we enabled 40 MHz channels on the 5 GHz band. Our solution at the time was to completely disable the 5GHz band at the APs where the Chromebooks were to be utilized.

***********************************

All of these connection issues were resolved when we upgraded the OS from 6.2.1.3 to 6.3.1.2. Each model of Chromebook is able to connect fine on the 5 GHz band, using both 20 and 40 MHz channels. We are unable to reproduce the problem now that we are running 6.3.1.2. 

Thanks for all of the input and suggestions.

Steve

I was just alerted to this thread.  I had this same problem a couple of years ago.  At the time we were using Symbol/Motorola wireless access points.  The problem went away when I cycled power on a network switch.  I still have no idea why a network switch could be causing the problems because some Chromebook would work and others wouldn't.

Our Aruba3400-US controller shows version 6.4.0.1, so I have to wonder how relevant this info is to our issue. If you are saying that there have been similar issues with a different model, I think it's time to get Aruba involved. While we have each Chromebook with it's own dhcp reservation set, we get daily dropouts (disconnects) from random machines and the reservation name somehow changes to  "BAD_ADDRESS". The only way to get the cb to connect back to the network is by deleting the reservation and recreating it.

Thoughts? 

A theory was posted in the Spiceworks community that the Chromebook problem could be caused by the Chromebooks timing out waiting for a response from DHCP.  I have no way to confirm that but it seems possible.  And, would explain why my cycling power on a switch made the problem go away for us.  I don't remember exactly why I needed to restart that switch, but it was a different issue from the Chromebook problem.  So, I guess it is possible that the switch was slow in forwarding traffic.

I'm going to go through all of them to see if that could be a possible cause. I'm also finding a difference in versions between CB's that drop out and the ones that never have. The differences are on the version of Chrome and also the platform version, whatever that is.

Since the CB cannot update the driver I guess this very much ties down to the driver compatibilities. If one is to deployed CB I would suggest to do a POC and check if the version is suitable before deployment elsethere will be a lot of work at the end of the day to try getting it working.