Wifi dropping randomly on managed machines -- Macbook Retina late-2013, Mavericks 10.9.4, Aruba APS

are the users that are having drops using bluetooth(BT) at the same time?
If so, there is a problem with the chipset that Apple has chosen it exists in windows computers as well with the same wifi/bluetooth chipset. Anyway when using BT, it weakens the 5ghz wifi signal, which then drops it to 2.4 for wifi since it looks stronger, then when you stop using the BT keyboard or external mouse it switches back to the 5ghz signal. So, one way around that is to change the 2.4 signal to have a different SSID, which could be inconvenient or stop using BT devices.
I have a VP at one of my customers that was very unhappy about that whole thing, luckily my windows support guy knew of this issue on some windows laptops and proved that with no BT devices the network was stable and with BT Keyboard and Mouse it would switch constantly. Kind of amazing that a laptop that costs 3x most windows laptops would use a cheap wifi/bt chipset.

I can't speak to all of them, but I know most of them don't use any bluetooth devices.

Curious as to what Aruba OS you are using and if you are using ClearPass along with it?

We are using Aruba as well over here and have noticed wireless dropping, sometimes similar to your case where a user will be sitting at their desk, and connectivity to the Aruba AP gets dropped. But not as extreme where it is dropping every 5 minutes. We just upgraded our controller and are running Aruba OS 6.4.1.0 with ClearPass, and with 255 Aruba 105 AP's.

I will check tomorrow if our users that are having these issues have BT enabled. I'm fairly certain they don't but we'll see. But off the top of my head, so far the users that have complained in our environment of wifi issues of connections dropping are our Macbook Air users.

Is the wireless preferred network profile completely gone, or can the user just not be able to connect back to the wifi ap?

Big bump on this one. We use Aruba and have seen the same issue with our managed 10.9.4 and 10.7.x clients. Like you said seems to happen mostly to the managed computers. I even tried updating our controller from 6.3.1.2 to 6.3.1.11. It does seem the drop offs have been a little better (tough it's been only a day) but the big problems is now our clients will get a valid DHCP IP, but will still have "!" on the network icon on the top of the screen stating no internet connection. I can ping the gateway of the scope and the IP of the vlan fort hat scope on the controller but that's it. When i removed the casper management profile and restarted, all of a sudden we had full internet access with no issues. It's almost as if something in the MDM profile or restrictions profile is blocking some of the networking features in the OS?

We're running Aruba OS 6.3.1.9 and CPPM version 6.3.4.64924 AirGroup ClearPass Guest version 6.3.4.30200 w/o any wireless dropping or roaming issues with 802.1x auth on managed mid 2013 MBAirs running 10.9.4-5. We're not using a config profile for any wifi settings. We have ~ 130 APs on campus mix of 104s/105s/134s/135s. We'll be introducing 225s into the environment at the start of 2015.
-L

We also see this issue with Cisco Access Points and a Cisco ACS running it all.

So far my only solution is to remove any extra joined networks, verify that our internal network is at the top of the priority list, verify the time is correct, then make sure the machine is connecting. I then reboot and it works again for some time, but eventually comes back.

It almost seems that when logged in, if the client takes the machine home, joins another network and then returns back to our network (without restarting or logging out) it joins and disconnects continuously until Securing a connection and rebooting.

I've not confirmed this but its worked most of the time so far.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools