You're likely running in to a broadcom chipset/driver issue concerning the world mode information element that Cisco includes in the beacons. When a broadcom-based device (Apple seems most prevalent but I've seen HP laptops do the same) sees the world mode information element, it "freaks out" and will reduce to zero and/or wildly alter the client's power output.
The problem seems to only occur in 5GHz. For Macs, they tend to start out in 2.4GHz, but if stationary long enough, they seem to transition to 5GHz, and when they do, they have performance/connection issues. Turn off 5GHz and see if the Mac issues go away. If they do, Cisco has a engineering build of 5.2.178 (I think it's 5.2.178.16) that has a controller-wide setting for disabling world mode IE. Once we disabled world mode ie on our controllers, our Mac issues evaporated. I don't think 6.0 has this as of yet, but when I tested 6.0, the problem appears to be gone. That said, broadcom was made aware of the bug months ago, so perhaps the latest OS X 10.5.7 contains the driver fix? Jeff >>> "Case, Brandon J" <[email protected]> 06/16/09 6:28 AM >>> Is anyone out there a Cisco controller shop that's seeing lots of troubles with Apple products? We're transitioning (still) to an entirely controller-based infrastructure so we have a mix of buildings that are running on those and some that are still IOS-based APs. Lately it seems a lot of tickets are coming into our help desk from Apple users that are in the vein of "it used to work but now it doesn't" but only in buildings running on the controllers. I'm left scratching my head as to why since I cannot reproduce the problem on my. A while back there was a thread on this list about tweaking EAP timers and I've made those changes to our controllers but to no avail. Anyone have any insight into this? Thanks, -- Brandon Case, CCNA Network Engineer, ITaP Purdue University [email protected] Office: (765)49-67096 Mobile: (765)479-7597 Fax: (765)49-46620 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. </[email protected]> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
