Wireless Laptops - Domain not available

We seems to be getting a lot of problems with our wireless laptops (and a few wireless desktops).

They will work fine for serveral weeks and then suddenly someone will try and log on and get the error message: "Unable to log on, the domain is not available".

Logging on locally it is clear that the wireless network is still connected with a good signal. The machine is still in active directory and still has a valid IP address. The only fix is to rejoin the machine to the domain, and then it works fine again.

This only seems to affect wireless clients and seems to be very random. We have a Meru wireless network. Does anyone have any ideas? I had a previous suggestion that this might be caused by machines that had not been sysprepped, but all ours have.

Thanks.

What wireless system do you use?

Do you use RADIUS?

I had a problem with some laptops a while ago. Same problem. They wouldn't log on to the domain. When I logged on locally I noticed that it was 30 seconds or so before the wireless kicked in. It seemed it would only start the connection after it had been logged in. I tried all the usual, re-configure the wireless settings on the laptop, try static IP, restart the device. I updated the driver and hey presto it works fine now

We had a similar problem with the wireless taking about 30 secs to start up. An update of the wireless card drivers fixed this, maybe worth a look.

Thanks. I'll take a look at drivers then. Just wierd that is affecting many different types of computer. We have a Meru network, and no, not using Radius at the moment but may move to it soon.

Have you tried rebooting the nearest AP? that you know it's going to be using, or the system itself ( demending on what and how big the wireless system is) could be its taking a long time to authenticate with the APs

I had a similar problem about a fortnight ago. The laptops would give the message 'Domain not available' when trying to log on to the network. When you log on locally it connected fine but it was because the wireless pgm wasn't starting until after you had logged on. Solution was to uninstall the wireless program and just install the drivers so that Windows wireless settings used that instead. Works great now, no drop outs.

never use the vendors applicaton always use windows wireless manager

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Originally Posted by fedora_explorer

I had a problem with some laptops a while ago. Same problem. They wouldn't log on to the domain. When I logged on locally I noticed that it was 30 seconds or so before the wireless kicked in. It seemed it would only start the connection after it had been logged in. I tried all the usual, re-configure the wireless settings on the laptop, try static IP, restart the device. I updated the driver and hey presto it works fine now

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Some wireless drivers, notably Intel chipsets, have the (mis)feature of not enabling a WLAN card until after logging in unless non default options are selected.

I didn't know that. I'll have a look to see if I can see that next time I'm at that school. It works ok now with the drive update but could be the newer version of the driver has that option disabled as default rather than the other way around.

I'm trying to think of a situation where you'd want the wireless to start after log in

I'm guessing you're doing PEAP authentication with roaming profiles and therefore it's most likely to be a bug that exists in the Windows XP wireless IP stack. By default the machine password changes every 30days, if that password happens to expire when the machine is off the network, XP will not be able to do machine authentication as it will try to use the old password. The only fix is to hard wire into the network and log in, this will then update the machine password. You can try disabling the machine password change within group policy, or the better alternative is to move to EAP-TLS (certificate authentication). Heres the MS KB on it Authentication may not succeed when you use PEAP-MS-CHAP-v2 as the authentication method for an 802.1X connection in Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000