Ruckus Wireless and Early 2015 Macbook Pro Retina

[plawrence]

Hi Nation

Is anyone out there using Ruckus wireless with 10.11 and Early 2015 Macbook Pro Retinas? We are seeing some issues where laptops are losing network connectivity after waking from a 2min or longer sleep. Ruckus hardware is the R600 along with a Zone Director 1200.

A freshly installed 10.11 Early 2015 Macbook Pro Retina does not exhibit this issue until the JAMF framework is installed.

We are working with Ruckus on troubleshooting the issue, but it appears to be oddly specific so I'd be interested to know if there is anyone out there with a similar setup.

[plawrence]

Further testing today indicates that the issue lies somewhere with the TCPKeepAlive status. When the jamf binary is installed, all sleep states are entered with TCPKeepAlive set to Active. Installing OS X 10.11 on a Macbook Pro Retina and then activating iCloud and Back to My Mac also sets TCPKeepAlive to active whenever the laptop sleeps.

So it appears as though the Ruckus access points aren't handling this correctly? I'd love to hear if anyone else can verify this behaviour.

[hnl]

Hi Patrick,

We have a similar problem, the difference in your and us, we have the 3000 controller and the R700 access points.
Did you find a solution for this problem?

[jandrewartha]

Hi Hakan,

I work with Patrick and have been doing more testing. Ruckus said it's actually a Mac bug which is fixed in the latest Sierra beta (8), which I've confirmed. It also doesn't happen with a 7982 802.11n AP they lent us, so it's model specific problem. They're supposed to be coming back to us this week with possible workarounds, as well as lending us an R500 and R710 for more testing, but I haven't received either yet.

Also, the TCPKeepAlive message is in the output of pmset -g log and our best guess is that it's apsd (Apple Push Notification service daemon) that's keeping the laptop connected to the wifi. A bonus is that if Airplay is active when the laptop sleeps, the wifi will stop scanning and no networks will be visible in the wifi menu extra. This is solvable by killall AirPlayXPCHelper.

[Steveuser]

I am having the same issue with 2 MacBook pros early 15 Retina, ZD1200 and 3 R600's. I have to turn wifi off then back on to restore internet access. I haven't had the chance to call Ruckis yet...is there a fix?

[plawrence]

@hnl @Steveuser

The only fix we have received from Ruckus so far is to update to macOS 10.12 Sierra. Oddly we don't see this issue with other wireless vendors, so I'd like to think there is something Ruckus could do to work around the issue. At first we thought this was just a problem we were seeing in our environment, so its kind of reassuring to hear that other people are running into the same problem, but at the same time, I feel your pain!

I strongly encourage you both to contact Ruckus support and push for a solution to this problem, reference them to this thread if need be.

Its unfortunate that the R700 seems to have the same issue, we will hopefully test with some other hardware soon and will update this post with our findings.

[jandrewartha]

Our Ruckus case number is 458291.

[Steveuser]

I have updated 2 MacBook Pro's early 2015 to the Sierra GM 10.12 and the problem still exists. I have emailed Ruckus that installing Sierra does not fix the problem. waiting to hear back from them.

[Steveuser]

After using both MacBooks throughout the day, it only happened that one time. The remainder of the day has been working fine. I will update if it occurs again.

[itportland]

We've seen somewhat similar issues, but never narrowed it down. We have ZD1200 + R710s and are 98% 10.10 and 10.11 OSX with 802.1x-auth. We're now on ZD 9.13 and things seem more stable.

I had been working with Ruckus off and on for the past few months on strange roaming issues/dropped connections. They once stated they were aware of an issue with OSX and were working with Apple engineering. We've done a fair amount of tuning to alleviate the issues...maybe Sierra is the silver bullet :)

[cway]

We have had a similar issue for the past year or two. For a very small population of employees (about 10% of our 140 or so Macbooks) we have random drop-outs, and for the vast majority of employees we see drop-outs after coming out of sleep. This often requires WiFi to be disabled and re-enabled to regain connectivity. Our WiFi APs are all Ruckus 700s, with a ZoneDirector 1106.

Can anyone confirm whether this is indeed an Apple issue and whether a Sierra upgrade has solved this for them?

[itportland]

Ruckus finally got back with a potential resolution...they stated enabling proxy ARP for the SSID would resolve the issue. But it has now re-appeared. Basically, a client is connected to an AP, but can't browse the web. The work around is turning off/on your wireless adapter.

The second resolution was to upgrade to Sierra. I'm now thinking of switching to Cisco..

[jandrewartha]

Proxy ARP solves a different issue, where OS X 10.10+ goes to sleep too early and misses broadcast traffic, including ARP requests. I can discuss this more if anyone's interested, as it does have similar symptoms (can't browse the web), but it's not the problem this thread is about.

We did some more testing with Ruckus with different AP models, trying to determine why we only saw the problem with the R500 and R600, but not when connecting to R510 or R710, even though Apple apparently reproduced the bug on the R710. The conclusion we came to was the 10.11 client changed behaviour on the R[57]10s and just stopped responding when asleep (instead of staying connected and hitting the bug that corrupts an encryption key), causing the AP to deauth it after a bit and hence for the client to reauth when it woke up from sleep.

So there's probably two OS X bugs, which happen to cancel each other out in certain environments. I'm fairly confident in saying it was an OS X bug, and it is fixed in Sierra, even though it only happened on Ruckus APs. Which isn't much consolation for those who have been suffering it for a year.

itportland: Yeah, that's the bug that Apple has fixed in Sierra. Good luck with Cisco, but I'm pretty sure there's no perfect wireless vendor out there :/ We also tried Meraki in one building, but it has no option to turn on Proxy ARP and our users complained about performance which they've never done before, so we sent back the APs after a week.

[rbn]

Thank you som much jandrewartha for sharing all this. I created this account just to reply.

I am a consultant and support almost only macs and most networks are Ruckus. So yes, I have been fighting this to. Would love to get in touch with others that deploy the same kind of wireless network so I am not only forced to ruckus support, nothing wrong with them, they are great, but sometimes it is easier to share stuff with others that actually "live" in the same environment.

Take care!

[mct2ok]

Man this is the worst problem. I have worked on and off with Ruckus for months. We are new to Ruckus and deployed a ZD 1200 and 5 APs. They won't stay connected, after a couple minutes of inactivity and you have to turn off wifi and turn it back on to get it going. The client is ready to move to Aruba and so are we. Not getting an answer from Ruckus is driving us crazy. Has anybody heard any more about this?

[craig_caruso]

Any update on this?

[dulban]

We have begun to see the issue again with the latest release of Ruckus 10.1.1 build 26. Version 10.0 was stable. Rather than roll back we are suffering through it as we work with Ruckus on the issue. Our environment is a mix of R700, R710, R720, R510 and R610 AP’s all on a ZD300 along with a mix of Mac hardware. The issue seems to be affecting Sierra devices more so than High Sierra as far as we can determine. Has anyone else seen this issue reemerge as this is an older post?