iPads disconnected from Cisco APs

[rhienwei2010]

I have 11 Cisco 1142 APs in our 7 offices, and all got many complains from iPad users reporting their wifi connection intermittently dropped from Cisco APs, and they have go back iPad setting to reconnect.

Is there an offical conclution why iPads have so many pain to connect Cisco APs?  Is it like iPads need to be upgrade to a certain version, or Cisco 1142 APs need to be upgrade to a certain version?

Thanks a lot.

[scott.stapleton]

Most commonly the sessions timeout and user idle timeout are to blame.

If you're interested in the specific details.....

Cisco defaults the session timeout to 30 mins for WPA/WPA2 (from memory, Open authentication is a different timer). I can't see the pupose of the session timeout to be honest. I believe it is there for legacy (Dynamic WEP) to ensure unicast keys are rotated which made sense. For WPA/WPA2 I don't see the purpose of deliberately disconnecting a client after 30 min's as I'm happy enough with the security offered by disabling it (which doesn't disable it but sets it to 24 hrs). Broadcast keys are already rotated every hour.

For all L2 WLANs I now disable session timeout and set user idle timeout to an increased value, dependant on the specific deployment (2 - 8 hrs, etc). For L3 WLANs, I set it based on customer requirements (30 mins is also typically too short).

There are many defaults that are poor on the WLCs imo but having said that, Apple devices ability to associate, authenticate and quite possibly their channel scanning/probing behavior is not great.

[rhienwei2010]

Thanks for the response.  I do have session time out set at 30mins, but not all disconnection happened after 30mins connection time, and it not happened all the time even to a same iPad, some good day it could connect all day long, but some bad days it dropped connection frequently.

[Scott Fella]

The session timeout I usually will disable but the idle timer is only affective on the iPad and iPhones if they are using WebAuth on the WLC. I have a couple different gen iPad and usually test when I'm doing an install and never have issues with them unless its a WebAuth and that's when you tweak your idle timer.

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