Q: Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

sohyule wrote:

 

My wifi worked fine with snow leopard, then got messed up with lion.

solved by

http://rys.pixeltards.com/2011/09/04/osx-lion-wifi.html

basically replacing lion wifi driver with snow leopard one.

Read this advice a few times and it seems to work.

But I think It's not a good Idea at all as such a "hack" may void your warranty and also may cause trouble with future OS Updates or technical enhancement in the WiFi.

Apple had for sure a good reason to put the new driver in the system instead of keeping the former one.

On the other hand ...if it works *shrug*

Lupunus

Not sure keeping the old driver is a *hack* -- anyway reporting that my wifi has been working fine ever since, which is about a week now.

Just for your information

There where recently some new findings and information's along another discussion in the Community which will be eventually helpful to some people here dealing with the ugly WiFi problems.

Take a look at --> https://discussions.apple.com/message/16213907#16213907

Good luck - Lupunus

FYI - I replied to that thread with the email I sent to Apple support over the weekend:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16214250#16214250

Crossing fingers that this helps.

Thanks for this ink.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16213907#16213907

That thread is quite technical.

I'll just write a few things here in the hope that something might help...

I have five hardwares (with five different OSs) connected wirelessly to the same router connected to a cable modem.

The router setup: 802.11n and g, wpa2 personal, ssid not hidden,

and mostly default setup; automatic channel switch, 100 for beacon etc.

All were working fine, occasional wireless hiccups here and there tolerable.

Then I upgraded to Lion (10.7.1 at the time of replacement with the old driver) and began to have this random wifi drop.  This was happening only with my imac, the others were and are ok.

With the old driver in place, the imac's working fine again.

Clearly the Lion wifi driver has a bug.

I have been watching this discussion for two months and not experiencing the problems described here.  Still trying to tease out the common threads.  I suspect that there are probably multiple problems being swept into this discussion but the finger clearly points to Lion. However there has to be more to it since not everybody is seeing the same issue.

I am currently wondering if everybody with the symptoms is on a dual-band router.  I am on a single-band router and running 802.11g only (I seem to have somewheat worse performance when running g/n but I don't have the diagnostics to quantify that suspicion).

Doc

sohyule wrote:

I have five hardwares (with five different OSs) connected wirelessly to the same router connected to a cable modem.

 

All were working fine, occasional wireless hiccups here and there tolerable.

Then I upgraded to Lion (10.7.1 at the time of replacement with the old driver) and began to have this random wifi drop.

The "hiccups" where the first indicators that's something may be wrong in the network.

And, as most of us, you decided to ignore them.

After the upgrade, from what on the things became worse, you noticed them, cause the new OS want no longer tolerate them.

Lupunus

The hiccups in the network is a way of home digital life. I don't expect ever not having them.

If the new OS replaces occasional buffering, momentary freezing, slowing down with dropping the signal at random points, going in and out of the network on whim, or not coming back online until wireless on/off is pushed yet again, I don't know if that is an improvement. It's annoying that Apple is quiet over this.

Anyway what do you think of Doc's single-band idea? Worth trying?

No, in my case it's not a dual band router. I have two routers of the Linksys WRT54G family running. These are just b/g routers, rather old, nothing fancy. One runs still its original firmware, the other uses OpenWRT.

They serve different networks (different SSID) and use different channels (separated enough so I won't expect problems from this side. There are rougly a dozen alien networks visible, but mine provide the strongest signals at the place of my computers. And I've choosen channels for both routers which are nearly devoid of any other network (most "foreigners" are using channel 6, some channel 9 to 11, so I've chosen 4 and 13 for mine). They are each the only access points in their respective networks.

The router which is used by my server is the OpenWRT box. I never discovered any similar "hiccups" or even "less problematic issues" on both networks before.

(Clients are a Dell notebook running with Windows Vista, a Mac Pro, a second Mac mini (2010 version) and several smartphones (Android, BlackBerry Devices) and the 2007 Mac Mini, now with Lion Server. The Mac Pro and the other Mac Mini are running with Snow Leopard. But these latter two boxes use the WiFi network only occassionally, they are normally connected via ethernet, so these are not very dependable witnesses... ;-))

So, in my case I might have issues with disturbing neighbours, but neither BSSID switching nor trouble to figure out the right band to use could be the cause of the trouble.

My log now shows that I have between one and eight drop-outs a day.

Webbasan,

Good input. Thanks.  What are you logging and what is your signature for a "drop-out"?  Others are seeing much higher drop rates.

Doc

sohyule wrote:

 

If the new OS replaces ....

It's not the OS, it's the wifi chipset and driver, regardless of the used OS.

sohyule wrote:

Anyway what do you think of Doc's single-band idea? Worth trying?

My own wireless now runs on 2.4GHz 802.11n / 5GHz 802.11n only as I can't switch off the 2.4GHz on my router (Airport Extreme) but the stations are all set tu use the 5GHz 802.11.n only.

No hickups or drop's since as said before.

Lupunus

I referred to my earlier post: https://discussions.apple.com/message/16182818#16182818

Since I created and started my script I can see how often it's necessary to do the "WiFi hard-reset" cycle.

After all, I still think we are seeing several different causes for the same "WiFi stops working" symptom here, which have to be adressed altogether to get satisfying network connections again.

But I'm afraid that it will be a long way until that goal is reached since the people at Apple have to set the priorities for which issues have to be tackled first.

What's most annoying in my case are the "network configuration changed" messages of Lion Server during those cycles, which are suggesting that the services might stop working properly due to the "configuration change": when WiFi is disabled, it appears that the default IP and hostname are reset to that of the ethernet address (private network and hostname) -- which is not really surprising for me -- and then changed back to the intended IP and hostname if it goes up again.

But sometimes, only the messages which indicate the change to the private address are sent, and I miss the corresponding message that everything turned back to normal. I hesitate to let the "Server" application do the suggested "repair" run, because I'm somewhat expecting that things will become worse.

After all, a running process shouldn't be annoyed even if its server socket is closed temporarily due to that down/up cycle, and it seems that at least mail, web and DNS really aren't. But I have to keep an eye on that, too.

And, at least Lion Server has still some good points for me: since I don't need the server to be a Windows "Primary Domain Controller" any more and it still has enough of the "expert mode" features available for my requirements...

(@Apple: I do require the detailed settings of DNS and Mail in ServerAdmin, so please don't even think about removing them!!! And I really miss the Web-Server settings already!)

The new applications do their job well and it really boots faster on that Mac Mini than Leopard Server. Not that the server will be rebooted that much, but it's nice during updates.

webbasan wrote:

 

They serve different networks (different SSID)

The Mac's seems to have a problem with the "known network" function if both SSID's are in the "known network" list of a Mac and reachable.

I've read elsewhere also, that there is problem (bug?) in the connection between network setup (known networks) and the keychain mechanism of the OS X.

For that you should eventually delete one of your SSID's from the Mac's list and the keychain and eventually uncheck the "Ask to join new networks" option in System Setup. Look at the small change in the tiny printed text underneath the option to get an idea "why".

webbasan wrote:

(Clients are a Dell notebook running with Windows Vista, a Mac Pro, a second Mac mini (2010 version) and several smartphones (Android, BlackBerry Devices) and the 2007 Mac Mini, now with Lion Server. The Mac Pro and the other Mac Mini are running with Snow Leopard. But these latter two boxes use the WiFi network only occassionally, they are normally connected via ethernet, so these are not very dependable witnesses... ;-))

I've had a case last week, where the Droid was killing the whole wifi shortly after connecting via "automatically join" option. Android forums reports, that there may be problem with this function under some circumstances.

Not to forget, that Bluetooth works also at the 2.4 GHz band and can produce heavy interferences, depending on the used channel.

What leeds to:

And I've choosen channels for both routers which are nearly devoid of any other network (most "foreigners" are using channel 6, some channel 9 to 11, so I've chosen 4 and 13 for mine).

As most routers are set by default to use "best performance" (Kanalbreite ausnutzen) you should, if possible, have at least a 5 channel gap between the strongest neighbor net or own Bluetooth device and the channel used by your router, as the channels are overlapping and the signal is also not cut off "razorsharp" at the end of the used frequency.

(Mit 802.11g sollten nur noch die Kanäle 1, 5, 9 und 13 verwendet werden, um dem überlappungsfreien 20-MHz-Kanalschema gerecht zu werden.)

(Picture: wikipedia commons. Licence: GNU/Creative Commons)

I wrote the above in German, as in USA and Japan a different channel scheme is used for 802.11g.

• 802.11g: 11 Channels in USA, 13 in Europe and Japan.
• Overlapping free channels: 3 in USA, 4 in Europe and Japan

I hope this may give you some more ideas for your troubleshoot.

Cheers - Lupunus

webbasan wrote:

 

After all, I still think we are seeing several different causes for the same "WiFi stops working" symptom here, which have to be adressed altogether to get satisfying network connections again.

FULL ACK

webbasan wrote:

But I'm afraid that it will be a long way until that goal is reached since the people at Apple have to set the priorities for which issues have to be tackled first.

I don't think that Apple will do much on the problems reported here.

Unfortunately, the people affected with the wireless drop's and hustle, even if count in thousands, are only a very small group compared to the millions using wireless on Lion without any problem.

For that, I think the best way is to help yourself (if one are able to do so) instead of waiting for a "miracle" update from Apple.

webbasan wrote:

What's most annoying in my case are the "network configuration changed" messages of Lion Server during those cycles, which are suggesting that the services might stop working properly due to the "configuration change": when WiFi is disabled, it appears that the default IP and hostname are reset to that of the ethernet address (private network and hostname) -- which is not really surprising for me -- and then changed back to the intended IP and hostname if it goes up again.

I'm not sure that I understand this correct.

Have you run wireless and Ethernet simultaneously on the same machine? If yes, that's not a good idea.

Also using two different IP ranges for wireless and Ethernet is not the best thing.

If I misunderstood your writing, you should eventually check, that the Mac's and the Windows systems (all other dvices too) uses the same local domain (workgroup) as Apple use ".local" for that and Windows (depending on version) ".workgroup" or something like that.

Having different "workgroups" in the same network segment causes trouble; e.g. one system is reachable at lupunus-mbpro.local and another machine at vista-box.workgroup.

Referring to my last answer to you, you should (if possible) also eventually set up the two access points (routers) for roaming the wireless instead of using two different SSID's and channels.

Cheers - Lupunus

Dear Lupunus,

I read always carefully your replies but I must admit that they are a bit too technical for me.

I am having this terrible problem and I am totally lost: I have an Imat with Lion 10.7.1, I have only a modem (no router) and I cannot find any solution that would solve my problem.

Can you tell me what can I try?

Apple seems really useless and the most terrible things is that they do not care. I called the apple care many times and they ignore the problem.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

Mauro