Windows 7 Clients losing GPO delivered Wi-Fi Details

[TurnItOffAndOn]

Right I am having an issue with Windows 7 laptops that keep losing\forgetting their Wi-Fi details. We use GPO to deliver our Wi-Fi details using Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Wireless Network (802.11) Policies. We also have a certificate delivered by GPO to so we can use that for authenticating clients. We use NPS on Windows 2008 R2 and Meru Wi-Fi and controller.

 

So this happens totally at random with any of the 150+ laptops we have on site. A laptop is unable to find the login server. A pupil will bring the laptop to us. The only way we have to remedy this is to connect the laptop to the network using a CAT5e cable. You login as administrator and then run GPupdate /force. Reboot the laptop and disconnect from the wired network. The laptop will then work no problems.

 

You could say doing this is not a great hardship but it is now almost becoming a daily occurrence with multiple laptops.

 

Has anyone else experience this problem? If so, did you find away around this?

 

Many thanks

 

Ant

[notnow]

Hi Ant,

We used to get this issue a lot on our old Aruba system so it is not specific to Meru. I can't prove it but I have a feeling many odd issues disappeared when we recreated a lot of our group policies from scratch that had been around since Windows XP/2003. Worth a try on your Wi-Fi policy and check the settings if you haven't already done this.

 

Regards,

Richard.

[free780]

What are you using for your radius server?

[TurnItOffAndOn]

We are using the meru controller with Microsoft nps for authentication

[free780]

Are you authenticating by computer or user?

[TurnItOffAndOn]

By computer using security groups in ad

[PeterH]

We're battling with this as well in a very similar set up. It's a real pain and worse still doesn't seem to be fixed even in Windows 8.1.

 

The problem seems to be that Windows loses the WLAN profile and can't re-import it. If you dig into the event log and go to Applications and Service logs | Microsoft | Windows | WLAN-Autoconfig | Operational you will find event ID 14003 WLGPA saying "A wireless group policy couldn't be applied to your computer". That is the cause of the problem, but I don't know what triggers it. The net result is that the computer loses the wlan profile and cannot connect to your wlan.

 

I don't really have a solution, but we are in the process of developing a startup script that will check if the WLAN profile exists and then re-import it if it doesn't. The script itself would obviously need to reside on the hard drive of the laptop not on the network. It uses the netsh wlan commands and does something along the lines of:

 

netsh wlan connect "your wlan profile name"
'Read the netsh wlan output and check for a known error
netsh wlan add profile filename ="c:\windows\your-wlan-profile.xml"
netsh wlan connect "your wlan profile name"

 

For the script to work you need an xml file containing your wlan profile. You can get this by doing this on a working machine:

 

netsh wlan show profiles
netsh wlan export profile "your wlan profile name" folder=c:\windows

 

You would need to ensure that the xml file and startup script exists on each machine, so you would need to distribute them somehow, perhaps using group policy prefs.

 

The script would then run each time the machine starts up, check to see if it can connect to the wlan and then import the profile if it can't.

 

Hopefully that might give you a few ideas. I can post the script if you like, but it's written in vbscript, and not well tested at this stage.

[localzuk]

We occasionally find a laptop which has decided to forget its wifi settings. Our SOP here is re-image though to be honest! For us, its pretty rare though - probably a couple of laptops ever few months.