Problem with Hotspot and Apple products

RouterOS General
1

Hi all

Every other day we get a call from a customer complaining their phone/laptop is always having to log into the hotspot and sometimes in quick succession. When more information is gathered the common denominator is that it’s an Apple product (either a iphone or a macbook)? The current workaround is to add the device by MAC address on our radius servers and the problem is solved. The only problem with this method is that it is time consuming, as once added, an engineer needs to manually log into the controller and remove the host from the client list, so the controllers queries the radius server and picks up the log-in.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? It has been a problem since day one for us but now the network is getting so large (close to 100 controllers) it’s getting unworkable to manually process each MAC reregistration.

Thanks in advance

Jon

2

We saw this behavior if we used .local OR a real FQDN name for the hotspot URL. Changed the hotspot FQDN to something only resolvable locally (e.g. company.hotspot instead of company.local or hotspot.company.com) and the issue went away

3

Thanks aoakeley for your post.

We do not have any DNS resolving locally for security. Everything points to google public DNS. The only way to reach the hotspot is via IP address. Could this be the problem?

Thanks

Jon

4

Post “/ip hotspot profile”. I’m posting this on an iPhone5 logged in to a hotspot.

I’ve been surfing the internet for several minutes without any issues.