Students cannot download apps at school

Question

Level 1

9 points

Students cannot download apps at school

I cannot download apps at school. I am systems administrators at a school in Netherlands with 900 students with an iPad. Ipads are actively used in every days lessons. Our Wifi network is adequately equipped for heavy use, with 75 access points with 4 radios each, Gigabit cabling and network switches. An internetconnectio nof 300 Mbps. The firewall is not blocking the App Store . Still students cannot download apps. Sometimes , when they turn their ipad off and on again, they are able to download one or two apps. Our infrastructure was checked by an external network engineer and he couldn't find any blockage in the firewall or configuration that wouldn't permit communcation with the App Store, except for fragmented packets, which shouldn't be an issue. I have heard that Apple is actively capping bandwidth of users (ip-addresses) of heavy downloaders of the App Store. Is that true?. As we don't have any caching server , that might be the case. I can't however verify that. Do you have any suggestions?

iPad, iOS 9

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 5:32 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

iToaster

Level 3

739 points

Oct 8, 2015 5:53 PM in response to Sikkepitje

here's a list of the ports apple uses

TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products - Apple Support

It may be a DNS problem, to much traffic on wifi

check there is no restrictions on updating or installing apps in any profiles you have applied to the devices

if you have no restrictions try downloading apps from off site.

check any restrictions on wifi vlan, presuming students are segregated.

Grab a student device, connect it to staff wifi if it downloads OK you've got a network issue somewhere

try after hours, if it works you've got a network issue.

I've never heard of Apple capping bandwidth to users, Apple have massive server farms and bandwidth it match.

logically if this was an issue the apple forums would be full of users complaining about not being able to download apps

You could try wireshark and try capture what's happening on the network when you try to download apps

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Answer 2

Oct 10, 2015 6:43 AM in response to iToaster

iToaster wrote:

here's a list of the ports apple uses

TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products - Apple Support

It may be a DNS problem, to much traffic on wifi

check there is no restrictions on updating or installing apps in any profiles you have applied to the devices

if you have no restrictions try downloading apps from off site.

check any restrictions on wifi vlan, presuming students are segregated.

Grab a student device, connect it to staff wifi if it downloads OK you've got a network issue somewhere

try after hours, if it works you've got a network issue.

I've never heard of Apple capping bandwidth to users, Apple have massive server farms and bandwidth it match.

logically if this was an issue the apple forums would be full of users complaining about not being able to download apps

You could try wireshark and try capture what's happening on the network when you try to download apps

I think it's right.

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Answer 3

jbhnrh

Level 1

118 points

Oct 15, 2015 12:13 PM in response to Sikkepitje

One thing to keep in mind is that apple uses various CDN's (content delivery networks). Apple uses Akami for their servers for content delivery here in the US so you may want to check what ones are used in your country as their CDN's may be dropping your connections/packets, etc.

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