I have 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, 2 MacBookPro in my home and one PC. I tried to use TP-Link, Linksys and now Mikrotik devices as WiFi AP and always have the following problem:
After some time of work every Apple device lost connection with AP on IP level and there is no such problem with PC at all. The connection appears as established (and I can see the signal strength) on AP and device but no traffic is present there. I tried sniff WiFi interface on Mikrotik in order to confirm it. No ARP, no IP, no ping from AP, no traffic at all. If I reconnect to WIFi from the device it will work great again (for some time, it may be few seconds or few hours).
I use iOS 4, 5 and 6 on devices. I use AES CCM only. Preamble Mode is “both”.
I have 2 iPad2, 1 iPod, 1 iPhone4, 1 iPhone4s and a iPhone5 connected. Only device that ever had issues is the iphone5 and there is a confirmed issue with aes on some iphone5 devices(I have issues). The iPod did have connect issues but setting it up again removed the issues. I have ios5 and iOS6 on devices and ros 5.20
Also check which Wireless chipset the Apple devices have. Around 50% of them use Broadcom, others use Atheros. Check which ones are having the issues. You can see this in MacOS menu “About this mac → More info → System report”
IOS 6 has a confirmed bug with running mixed TKIP & aes on iphone4s and lower, so turn off TPIK in your router(should really be off anyway). iPhone5 has general wifi issues on some of the hardware and apple has not released any information but confirmed the issue. Workaround here is to run TKIP only since the defect affects aes only. Apple has not confirmed yet if its a HW issue or a software issue.
What I cannot understand: why there is wpa-psk appear in the authentication-types, because in the WinBox I see that it isn’t enable (attached). I have no iPhone5, most trouble devices are my iPad2. My MacBookPro have Broadcom chipset.
Also enable regular WPA not just WPA2, see if it helps
We just did some testing on multiple Mac devices, it seems that the MacOS has some sort of bug (?) - When you first time connect to it without a password, it saves it. After you set a WPA password, it doesn’t want to use it, because MacOS has saved that this AP doesn’t have any password. Instead of giving you a meaningful error, it says something like “connection timeout” or similar. What helps is clearing all remembered APs from the mac, disabling the Wifi, enabling it, and connecting then.
I enabled both WPA and WPA2. The situation is a same. After few hours of IDLE one of my iPads see connection but cannot even answer to ARP request. I see that Mikrotik update his last-activity timer for this item, I saw an ARP request in that time which ask who has 192.168.111.253.
I see that Mikrotik has 802.1x for this device, is it OK? I don’t have a RADIUS.
Sorry, but the problem still persist for at least two my iPads and one iPhone. You write about a bug in the MacOS but I don’t have that problem with WPA black password.
Is there any way to discover what is going on in the WiFi in that time when all my devices believe they are connected but it’s no so?
Yeah, I read above that just enabling TKIP and disabling AES is a workaround for Iphone 5 but when I tried this just now, I found that I could only telnet to the router and one other internet site and could not connect to most internet locations:
IOS 6 has a confirmed bug with running mixed TKIP & aes on iphone4s and lower, so turn off TPIK in your router(should really be off anyway). iPhone5 has general wifi issues on some of the hardware and apple has not released any information but confirmed the issue. Workaround here is to run TKIP only since the defect affects aes only. Apple has not confirmed yet if its a HW issue or a software issue.
I use only AES from the beginning and these trouble was with iOS 4, 5 and 6 for all Apple devices (MacBookPro, iPad 2, iPhone 3Gs/4). So it’s not a problem within iOS 6 or iPhone 6 at me. But this problem appears at long WiFi usage only. In my scenario - iPad 90% of the day connected to AP and use WiFi to check mail every few minutes. Then the problem happens about a once per day, but when I see clips on YouTube it happens every few minutes. My Mac and iPhone is not so affected just because Mac is not always connected to AP and iPhone is always travel with me.
On my iPhone5 I can get issues mostly when running Sonos, but also some times without Sonos running. Disabling and enabling wifi on my iphone5 will solve it for a while. I have not tried the TKIP workaround, since I have a lot of other devices connected I did not want to play with this.
I agree, but in all fairness I can’t see the problem with RouterOS since the issue is present on all major router / AP systems. PRO and consumer. Apple should get the boot for it!
