Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

vallejogreg wrote:

I am going to try turning off "Wake for Network Access" in the energy saving settings. This will hopefully bring me back to "leopard"

How do you figure that?

Pete

The wake on LAN stuff in unrelated to bonjour. It is an industry standard designed to facilitate remote admin and out of hours operations including backups. Most likely you are experiencing a problem with old firmware and/or compatibility with standards. Most routers older than a couple of years have issues with 802.11n because they implemented the proposed standard to get to market faster. There should be updates, and if your router has not had updates in more than a year, it may be time to replace it with something more current with standards. Note that 802.11ac is coming like a freight train to stores and devices near you, and there will be a whole new round of this...

Actually, "wake on lan" is somewhat related to Bonjour when the two are combined to form the Bonjour Sleep Proxy feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_Sleep_Proxy

However, I agree that it's unlikely this is causing failures to join Wi-Fi networks. Although it would be interesting to turn off "Wake for network access" and see if that fixes anything.

Speaking figuratively. All of these problems with wifi dropping seem to have begun with Snow Leopard. Coincidentally this is the OS that incorporated Bonjour Sleep Proxy. I think that only works with newer routers. I don't appreciate that upgrading to Snow Leopard requires me to buy a new router

Snoop Dogg wrote:

Actually, "wake on lan" is somewhat related to Bonjour when the two are combined to form the Bonjour Sleep Proxy feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_Sleep_Proxy

However, I agree that it's unlikely this is causing failures to join Wi-Fi networks. Although it would be interesting to turn off "Wake for network access" and see if that fixes anything.

Thanks for the pointer on this. I had not seen this as a point of interest, but clearly, this is probably "the feature" which stimulated the "won't reconnect on wake" issue. It would be interesting for those still experiencing problems with their routers to see if turning this feature off helps. I wonder if Apple turns it on when they sense support for it from the router, or if it is just on by default.

I never had a problem with Snow Leopard dropping wifi. I had a 2008 macbook pro with both Leopard and Snow Leopard connecting wirelessly to my work router and I never had problems.

It wasn't until I got a new Macbook Pro with Lion installed that I started having wifi issues. But I only have wifi issues at work. Lion works fine with my Linksys router at home.

I am pretty convinced that it has to do with the router. At least for me it is. I checked the firmware version of my work router and it is still at the factory version. There have been at least 3 updates that have happened and we haven't updated the router yet. Once I get that all figured out, hopefully today, I will update my progress.

joemoe1984 wrote:

I never had a problem with Snow Leopard dropping wifi. I had a 2008 macbook pro with both Leopard and Snow Leopard connecting wirelessly to my work router and I never had problems.

It wasn't until I got a new Macbook Pro with Lion installed that I started having wifi issues. But I only have wifi issues at work. Lion works fine with my Linksys router at home.

I am pretty convinced that it has to do with the router. At least for me it is. I checked the firmware version of my work router and it is still at the factory version. There have been at least 3 updates that have happened and we haven't updated the router yet. Once I get that all figured out, hopefully today, I will update my progress.

I think you are going after the right problem. Wireless routers are complete computers, and having the correct software in them is a necessity, and a responsibility of the owner at this point. I bet you will see better behavior after the update, but there could still be problems.

Thing is, to update router, you must have a 802.11n. The "n" is important. For instance, I have an airport express but it is only 802.11 g capable. Therefore, it is not able to update firmware any more than version 6.3. Apple is now using firmware 7.4.6 (more or less). Bring up Airport Utility and you will see your router capability.

I don't appreciate that OS X above Leopard forces me to buy a new router. However, I am pretty sure that turning off file sharing, and "wake for network access" will solve the WiFI drop problem when waking from sleep. OR, as I found on and Apple support article, if you want to use Airplay, AppleTV etc, and don't have a 802.11n capable router you could also just set energy saving setting to "never sleep".

Best solution: Set Energy Saving Preferences to "Never Sleep". Cheapest , easiest, most sensible. Your mac may only last 7 years instead of 10, but Hey! Who's counting?

Best solution: Set Energy Saving Preferences to "Never Sleep". Cheapest , easiest, most sensible. Your mac may only last 7 years instead of 10, but Hey! Who's counting?

Seriously. I'm 90% sure that the problem is a combination of Apple's attempt to reconcile easy wireless networking and it's "green" desire to save energy by using sleep mode.

Bonjor Sleep Proxy protocol, Apple's solution, requires updates and/or new devices (router must be 802.11n capable and have firmware update).

Hence Apple's own recommendation to just set sleep to "never" - especially if you have a bunch of devices (IPhones with Itunes on them, I pod touch, apple TV, time machine, or possibly even printers) all trying to wirelessly network while your computer is asleep!

If you're not into networking all this stuff, all of the time, and you want your computer to sleep, you can try the following: 1) turn off "wake for network access" in network prefs, 2) turn off "file sharing" in sharing prefs and 3) uncheck "share my library on local networks" in Itunes Preferences. I would also: 4) do manual backups (if you're into backing up), and only infrequently, for I tunes, and Time machine. They might cause same problem trying to back up while computer is asleep. It's a mess.

vallejogreg, you've provided no evidence that this has anything to do with Bonjour Sleep Proxy. You're just guessing.

You're right. Actually, I am guessing that it has to do with the 120 minute wake up cycle that interacts with Bonjour. But only when you don't have an 802.11n router with the latest firmware - thats my guessing.

Nonetheless, I did come across an apple support article that recommended set to "Never sleep" for best result when networking.

Not Guessing. See:
http://stuartcheshire.org/SleepProxy/

And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

It would seem that this "wake on demand" is a rather precarious undertaking and that it is rife with potential security issues. Further, since Apple can only suggest that device makers incorporate the Bonjour Sleep Protocol, it really depends on goodwill of competitors.

It appears that one must 1) either disable "Wake on Demand" in energy saving prefs, and turn off "Itunes FIle sharing" in Itunes Prefs. This if if you don't want to network a bunch of devices

If one wishes to network devices such as Iphones, Ipod touch, Apple TV, Time Machine thru a WiFi router, you can either 1) "never sleep" in energy saving preferences (Best) , or 2) make sure all your devices are fully updated to 802.11n for routers and firmware that includes Bonjour. Even then, according to literature, there are reliability problems

Yes, you're still guessing.

First of all, what actual problem are you seeing?

Currently no third party vendor implements a Bonjour Sleep Proxy server. It's only available with Apple Wi-Fi base stations.

On wake from sleep, machine unable to connect to network (thru wifi). It's all ovet the internet, iterations of the same complaint. The problem lies in the fact that Apple made Bonjour open source; hoping that 3rd party vendors would adopt it. But they are not.

This causes problems with wifi and ethernet networked devices when the machine sleeps. Unfortunately the nomenclature is even confusing - with some techs calling peripherals "clients", and others, "servers" ... this is actually the case because when a computer sleeps, with Bonjour, the router becomes the server.

Hey look, the guy was dying, they overstepped. It's not gonna work. Too many vulnerabilities. Not enough goodwill. You know they're in trouble when they use terms like "magic packets"