iPads fail to connect several times before succeeding. Open SSID w/ CWP.

[w1f1n00b]

Hoping someone may have some advice or troubleshooting suggestions. This has been a long term issue that is only a problem due to the fact that our IT department often on-boards dozens to hundreds of iPads at a time. I’ve done some config tweaking and testing but have never gained much progress in eliminating the issue.

During initial setup of an iPad, iOS prompts to select a Wi-Fi network. When selecting our SSID the iPad  displays the message “Unable to join ‘SSID NAME’ The network is temporarily unavailable. Try again later”.

This happens anywhere between 1-5 times before the connection succeeds. As you can imagine this is quite annoying and time consuming when trying to process many devices.

During the last round of testing this was happening sporadically. Sometimes multiple devices in a row would have the issue, and other times many would work without issue.

I’m really not sure if this is happening everywhere in the environment, as I imaging most users would not report this issue, especially if it’s not consistent. Managed devices connect to an 802.1x network automatically and don’t have this issue once they’re configured.

[w1f1n00b]

Will do. I’ll have to wait until the next round of iPad onboarding so I have a better chance of catching it in action.

[SamPirok · Accepted solution]

Hey there, it would be interesting to see some auth debugs taken while you tried to connect one of the problematic iPads, just to see if we can find a reason for the rejection or to confirm that the device is reaching out properly during the connection attempt. The guide linked below reviews how to enable auth debugs. I’d recommend enabling the debugs on an AP that the new devices should be connecting to, wait until you have a device with this issue, try to connect a few times and then pull tech data. If you want to send me the tech data and the MAC address of the device that was having issues connecting, I’d be happy to take a look for you, my email is community@extremenetworks.com. 

https://extremeportal.force.com/ExtrArticleDetail?an=000065975&q=auth%20debugs

The guide suggests disabling auth_info debugs, I’d be very grateful if you could do this step. The auth_info debugs are typically unhelpful and clutter the buffered log, making things much harder to read through.