OSX Mavericks Wifi BUG (WPA2-AES) (same as iOS 6?)

Just an update to my own post with:

- My trip to Apple store genius bar

- and a new "workaround" to this Wifi (AES) connectivity problem.

I made a trip down to my local Apple Store and their "genius" bar. I explained the problem, even took a copy of this post with me, showing side panel with "similar" issue listed. Here is a takeaway for anyone under the false impression that Apple reads and/or cares about anyone posting on these forums: I was flat out told by the Apple "genius" bar representative "anyone can post on these forums" and that "we (read: Apple) don't read these posts". i.e., These forums are set up for people to keep busy helping one another, and Apple could care less about what real problems are being reported here.

The best idea the "genius" bar guy came up with was to delete a certain system folder and see if "rebuilding" of the folder could potentially "fix" the issue. It did not, so I won't post the details of which folder as it is a fruitless exercise.

I was told to call the 1-800 "apple care" number. Pay the $30(USD) and see if they could help. I have not done this.

Here is the new workaround to the "can't stay on the Wifi network" issue that has been working very nicely:

• Open a terminal window (Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
• Figure out your Wifi router's IP address by running the following command at the terminal: netstat -rnfinetLook for "default" entry and note the IP address.
• Run the following command at the terminal prompt: ping -i 15 x.y.w.zWhere "x.y.w.z" is the actual IP address noted from 2nd step.
  This command will continuously send a small "ping" (ICMP) packet to your router, once every 15 seconds.
  This seems to actively maintain Wifi connectivity. You may need to adjust the 15 seconds interval if that value doesn't work for your case. It works nicely for my setup.
  These all should be good hints for any Apple development team member to try and reproduce this issue and try to find a fix. I won't hold my breath.

Hope this is helpful for others in similar situation, until Apple does something about this.

--patrick

This update adds a visual of commands at a terminal and an important note, which my previous post assumed to be obvious.

For this workaround to work:

1. the ping must be started while Wifi state is "healthy" (i.e., it is connected)

- and -

2. the ping must be allowed to continue for as long as you wish Wifi to remain connected (at least up until Apple fixes the bug).

Here is a simple shell script that will automate this for you. Copy the conent into a file named wififixer.sh (as an example). The from a terminal window you can run it as:

$ sh wififixer.sh

The code:

#!/bin/sh

#

# This code is being released to Public Domain.

#

# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND

# ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE

# IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE

# ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE

# FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL

# DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS

# OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)

# HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT

# LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY

# OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF

# SUCH DAMAGE.

#

# The purpose of this program script is to find the default gateway

# and continuously ping it every 15 seconds, in order to workaround

# Apple's BUG in their Wifi (AES) framework/driver, where Wifi

# connectivity is lost without continuous packet exchange.

#

# This BUG has been persistent in iOS 6 onward. It was also introduced

# with release of MacOS Mavericks 10.9.x.

#

# Reference: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5663520

# Find out IPv4 default gateway in route table.

gw=`netstat -rnfinet | grep default | awk '{print $2}'`

# If not found in route table, print message and exit.

test -z "${gw}" && echo "No (default) Gateway found." && exit 1

# ping the gateway every 15 seconds

ping -i 15 ${gw}

Two updates:

1. Upgrading to Mavericks (OS X 10.9.4) does NOT fix my issue.With this update, the problem manifests itself much later than previously. I have yet to make a study of it, but it take many minutes of network-inactivity before the problems is observed, where as in all Mavericks versions prior to 10.9.4, the drop in connectivity could be seen within a minute or two of network-inactivity.Whatever change Apple Wifi engineering team has made to the code, it has certainly changed the behavior, and unfortunately, it does give it the "appearance" of being fixed. This, I fear, will make affected users complain less than before. If this is a tactic Apple is deploying, just to reduce volume of complains, vs actually addressing the issue, I would not be surprised.
2. Side-note, not related to the 10.9.4 update, but I have played with the time interval between the pings in the wififixer.sh script (the "ping" workaround script) to see how far apart each ping can been an still not drop network-connectivity. 50 seconds seems to be the far limit that works for my situation. The idea is to reduce amount of unnecessary packets to a minimum.

HTH,