Q: OSX Yosemite Wifi issues

I just bought a new iMac two weeks ago and it was running more slowly than my very old iMac which seemed more than odd but I was beginning to think I was imagining it. A week on, and the wifi started flipping out constantly, usually when I clicked on a new page or back peddled to a page I'd just been looking at or clicked on something or other (as opposed to when I was just browsing). Crucially, it affected my partner's laptop too in that he couldn't get wifi either, so it was as though the fault, whatever it was, was affecting the hub/wifi connection itself or that the wifi connection itself was the problem, which nearly threw me off the scent. However, the problems only started after I'd got the new iMac so I felt sure it was related to this machine. After a google search I tried the following fix. Instantly my new iMac was running 10 times faster so I knew my initial feeling that it was running far too slowly for a new machine was correct. And, so far, it appears that it's fixed the wifi flip too, thank goodness. All I did was go to System Preferences. Click on 'energy saver' and then uncheck the box marked 'Wake for network access' and restart the machine. This was one of the fixes suggested somewhere on a forum. It was the only one I understood how to do and luckily it appears to have worked. I'll post again if the probs start again (if I can log on!). I have OS X Yosemite 10.10 and I think it's a 2013 model. (Begs the question should it have been a newer model or maybe that is the newest?)

@ Alex. I finally got to your recommendation on my list RE: DHCP. Turning on manual  IPv4 seems to have made a difference. this is the longest I've gone without issue. As said my router already manually assigned an IP to the iMac and other devices, but the iMac was on manual. So I set all the manual settings and so far so good. Also IPv6 is on Link-local only already so I left it as it. I've had it this way for years since other settings has been troublesome. Tried them for this issue with no change as per my expectation.

I have had my iMac streaming movies to Apple TV's through Wi-Fi, had a Skype chat and backups running without a failure. Try remember to check in tomorrow if it's still good. Thanks for the suggestion.

<Links Edited By Host>

That is interesting news.

So, seriously? Over 1,000 posts in this circular logic carousel. It has been determined that "discoveryd" has known issues and is replaced by "mDNSresponder". This being the topic of discussion in this thread within the first 100 posts.

Bravo! Kudos! Congradulations! Who would have thought?

Not moving from Mavericks!!

Cheers!! 

Beg your pardon, that's over 3,000 posts. Nice!! 

That's note-worthy!

Cheers!!

Well this is even more frustrating! It broke more stuff!!!

Now with manual IP set I get nothing at all. No amount of wifi restarting gets me a single peep. DHCP gets a connection but it's the regular drops every so often kind of connection....!!!!.....!!

Did a few NVRAM refreshers, power cycle, permissions and HDD check and ACL resets with no improvement.

Thank you! That worked!

Oh I didn't mean that it was news to me. Just that I find it interesting that Apple actually rolled back an entire service daemon for a relatively small group of well outspoken people. Just interesting news, not actual revelation or anything. Thanks for the concern 

On my front. After what was a horrifying few hours after this update it settled down and I thought it was teething issues and all is ok. But it later started frizzing again and had to reapply the wired connection. The fixed state I had just before the update is not-working anymore...

My 2 cents.
I have 2 WiFi Access Points at home, one is a Cisco EPC3925 cable router, the other one is a (~2010) Airport Express, and I use them for my iPhone 5S, iPad 2, MBP retina 15" 2014, and a linux PC.
I used to have the Airport express on 5 GHz (802.11n only) and the Cisco on 2.4 GHz on 802.11b/g, and they all worked great.

The thing is that the Cisco router is provided by a very popular ISP, and I've seen that I had connectivity issues at cafés etc.

Yesterday I swapped the frequencies/modes and got the Airport Express on 2.4 (b/g/n), still working ok.

The Cisco one on 5 GHz on supposedly on b/g/n - impossible, but for some reason it doesn't allow me to select 5 GHz on just 802.11n - started causing me the same behaviour as the ones in the cafés.

I saw that pinging the Access point had high latency, > 100ms, under no traffic load, with the occasional lost packets, and the connection would stop working after a while, or it would have trouble associating in the first place. In fact, 2/3 times it would not connect to the AP.

I messed around with a number of parameters (ACKs, WMM, channel width) to no avail.

Setting the encryption from TKIP-AES to AES only seems to have resolved the issue for me.
As TKIP is in reality for WPA, and AES for WPA2, having TKIP a possibility for WPA2 seems to (SOMETIMES) mess the connection up.

Of course, now that I want to replicate the results, it works fine in both modes.

itsomp wrote:

 

My 2 cents.

My 2 cents. Make darn sure you are keeping a log of the fiddling and changes you are making to your network. So many here are modifying willy-nilly in an attempt to fix an issue. Then, when the next update is released and things change you don’t want to be left scratching your head and wondering what happened.

Everybody! Fiddle all you want, reconfigure all you want but keep a log of what you did and when you did it so you can gracefully back out a step at a time.

Good advice. It's easy to lose track. Suffering from the wifi disconnection problem reported by many others (it started with 10.10.2 but became much worse with 10.10.3) I've tried every one of the squillion suggestions posted all over the place, including: every possible arrangement and adjustment of network preferences, rebuilding the system config files, turning off Bluetooth DUN and AWDL from the terminal, resetting the SMC and PRAM, flushing the DNS cache, fiddling with the keychain, and more. No effect at all. Odd that one effect should have so many suggested causes.  In the end I separated the bands on my router (BT Homehub 4) and switched from 5GHz to 2.4. Wifi has now been stable for 10 days. No idea why (or whether the measure would be helpful to others) but would be grateful if anyone could enlighten me. I've been going round for a couple of years saying that nothing would induce me to return to Windows, but another experience like this will strain my loyalty.

I'd like to add my name to this list of people having major Wifi problems with Yosemite 10.10.03, it renders my MBP useless with no WIFI connection, I actually had no wifi problems with 10.10.02

£2000 + MBP Sort it out Apple!

Pete

Yep add me to, this is nuts, look at how many MBP's are having problems at an average of about $2000 per unit, thats over $7.4 million, don't you think for that much money that apple has made off of us that they could get this fixed. I have to say it but the PC's do not seem to have this kind of problem. This has to be the worst that apple has every done to us.

Although I can get my connection to work, it ***** to have to reboot my computer every 15 min to regain a connection, I have tried all the fixes and none are perm.

I think Im going to try to run boot camp and run windows 7 to see if I get het same problem. Im sure it is software, though

FIX THIS APPLE OR LOSE A CUSTOMER!!!!

I have 3 MBP's, 5 iPhone 6 plus, apple tv's in every room,

If it helps

OS X Yosemite 10.10.3

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013)

No issues at all until Yosemite

Issue got worse after each update.

Now having to reboot to regain connection

I'm delighted to see that Apple's wifi engineering team seems to have realized that discoveryd was, at the minimum, not ready for release.  I hope they also realize that it's entire design premise was actually flawed and that it's demise is permanent.

Doing things like using name lookups to make decisions about whether or not a WiFi network is operational looks like a neat idea on the surface.  BUT, this idea is based upon a premise that is fundamentally untrue.  It is not necessary that any network be connected to a fully functional internet router with IPV6 name resolution into the apple.com or icloud.com domain in order to be functioning correctly.

DNS is, by design, a fault tolerant and highly tuneable SERVICE, which is not the same as a PROTOCOL like IP.  DNS may very well not exist, fail completely or just deliberately ignore certain queries *without* having the slightest meaning to the fundamental correctness of a network or its hardware.

The use of high level services like name resolution to make decisions about the quality or 'validity' of link layer network correctness is fundamentally defective thinking.  It's fine to make decisions about whether a particular SERVICE like icloud is available by asking another SERVICE a question (in this case DNS), but it is NOT valid to decide whether an entire network is correct based upon whether or not a desirable SERVICE ENDPOINT like icloud is available.

In other words, the fact that you can't resolve a particular apple.com or icloud.com name doesn't mean your WiFi is broken.  It just means that name can't be resolved, nothing more.  The behavior of discoveryd implicates that it was implemented to believe otherwise. and act upon that belief, with sometimes (often) disastrous results.

I hope Apple has flushed this particular mind-virus out of their collective brains for good.