ipads loosing internal wifi connection

DanNew
New Contributor

What could be done if all of a sudden student ipads are disconnecting from the internal wifi and they connect to the guest wifi and when you try to connect back to the internal its asking for a password. The ipads are setup with student information at the MDM so when the profile is in pulled in the internal wifi is in place. As of now the ipad has to be erased and re-setup in order for the device to connect back to the internal wifi. Is there a way within Jamf to tell the ipad to connect back to the internal wifi and what could be causing this issue.

7 REPLIES 7

larry_barrett
Valued Contributor

Are you installing a new wifi configuration over the top of an existing configuration?

cdenesha
Valued Contributor III

I don't know why it is happening. We see it occasionally in our school district. Why re-setup the entire device instead of pulling the WiFi profile and reinstalling?

Pro Tip: Create an Extension Attribute with a 'Yes' popup type. Create a Smart Group with criteria of when the EA is Yes. Put this SG as an exclusion to your WiFi profile. Then you can set an EA to Yes on the device and Save, the WiFi profile will uninstall. Set it back to blank and Save and the WiFi profile will install.

DanNew
New Contributor

No, When ipad is setup the configuration profile is pulled in with all the scopes

ucdcastillo
New Contributor

I have the same issue in my district, it started about a month ago, it doesn't happen in our old ipads with IOS 9, it happens in the newer ipads with IOS 12 or 13 (different revisions), the profile still on the device however it asks for a password. I have had in a cart of 30 maybe 10 to 12 with this issue. The fastest way for us has been resetting the device and let it re-enroll in JAMF, I had to set a temporary open wireless network, FYI make the SSID Apple Store and the ipads will auto-join when enrolling. Anyone has been able to figure out why this started to happen?

Emmert
Valued Contributor

We've seen an issue going on for at least this school year, and it might have happened or started last year as well, but we've been living with it for a while: the iPad's wifi profile appears to become corrupt/unusable/confused, and it prompts the student for the password.

Manually entering the password for the student isn't really an option because ours is sixty-some characters of gibberish.

What we started doing was adding an exception for the student's iPad, letting it get the profile removed, then removing the exception and letting it get the profile back again. Obviously this requires a backup password-less network you've got near you or the student for the shuffling around to happen.

We did have a problem once where one of our techs accidentally unscoped the wifi profile from all of our iPads, so rather than having random troubleshooters fooling around with the master wifi profile, we made a static group called "Fix Wifi" and added that as an exclusion; so now, when the wifi profile needs resetting, we add and remove the student in the "Fix Wifi" static group rather than directly touching the super-important master wifi profile.

I've heard complaints that this is all my fault for setting a long password on our wifi network instead of some arbitrarily short one, but I've yet to see some kind of documentation that iPads violate the spec and are special snowflakes.

All of that said, it hasn't come up for us as far as I know in the last couple of months. It might have been a one-time problem with a specific iOS or Jamf version?

Sorry for babbling, hope that helps.

Jalves
Contributor

I started seeing this issue with our one to one deployment this year. Devices all report inventory with config profile installed for WiFi. iPads are running iOS 14 and I am on JSS v10.25.1-t1602899070. We have a byod network that the kids are signing onto to install a duplicate student wifi profile via the self service app until I get a grasp of how wide spread this issue is. So far it's looking like 30-40% of my deployed devices... Luckily we are bringing students back in by grade level. I'm hoping I to just apply a clone of the same profile on all student devices hoping they pick it up at home or over the weekend prior to coming back into our network, but honestly wondering why it happened in the first place?

rusty_adams
New Contributor III

Yeah this is super annoying. Happens whenever we do a hard reset or "forget" the passwordless SSID we don't want student ipads connecting to. Only fix is to connect to internet some other way, then pull the config profile and send it back down. Completely unworkable for K-2 students.