AirPlay Connection Dropping When Client Roams To New AP (Meraki)

[Strawdog]

Since the start of term we've been experiencing a problem in our school with teachers who are AirPlaying, to hardwired 3rd generation Apple TVs from their MacBooks (Mountain Lion - 10.8.5), losing connection when their MacBooks decide to start hopping between the various APs in the vicinity.

 

We didn't have this problem before the summer holidays (at least not on this scale) which leads me to believe it is likely due to a Meraki firmware patch or something similar.

 

Does anyone know a way of increasing the tolerance on a MacBook to make it 'stickier' or something we can enable within the Meraki dashboard? At the moment some of the MacBooks are associating/disassociating 20 times, between various APs, over the course of an hour due to them lying within range of multiple APs.

 

This roaming behaviour (despite the client in most cases being sat on a desk the entire time) causes no problems for web browsing, network access or any other services reliant upon the wireless connection but AirPlay seems to need a completely constant connection otherwise it breaks the link.

[njc235]

Using the command line utility 'airport' in the command line you can force the mac not to roam.

[Strawdog]

I don't want to disable roaming, I just want it to be less aggressive (this can be adjusted within Windows by changing the Roaming Tendency). We have a single SSID (strictly speaking we have multiple SSIDs but the clients only connect to one of them) the problem is caused by the clients roaming between APs not networks.

 

I've been looking at the 'airport JoinMode=' options but these seem more targeted towards environments where there are multiple SSIDs available that you may have previously joined/are open networks.

Edited September 12, 2014 by Strawdog

[Strawdog]

Looking through the Meraki client event logs I'm beginning to suspect Band Steering might be the culprit or at least aggravating the issue - seeing lots of clients jump on to an AP at 2.4Ghz before switching over to 5Ghz within a couple of minutes, we then see the client disconnecting and connecting to another AP before repeating the same process.

 

I'd love to just switch this SSID over to pure 5Ghz but unfortunately we have a number of AirPlay printers on it that don't support 5Ghz (5Ghz is optional under 802.11n), I'll switch it to vanilla Dual Band and see if we notice any improvement.