Hey there everyone,
I'm going out on a limb here and i'm wondering if i can get any input on this...
I am having wireless issues at a grade school my company manages. I am one of the technicians that's been working on the issue. To give you a little background, the school is using two different types of chromebooks:
Samsung CE303C12 (uses a/b/g/n)
Acer C738T (uses a/b/g/n/ac)
Both of these devices are able to connect to the wireless networks fine up until two weeks ago when the school introduced a new SSO application for the chromebooks. The application they are using now is called Clever. Now there are two different ways you can authenticate to Clever, the first is through an email address and a password or the other way is through the SSO method which utilizes a QR code tied to each of the students. This is where things get interesting....
Method one on Wi-Fi (signing in with a Clever email address and password) *Note* this was done in a classroom on 1 Meru AP pushing out a/b/g
all 25 students connect to clever with an email address and password. They are able to load all of the applications perfectly fine, there are no connection drops, and all of the pings to the AP are in the 20-25ms range.
Method two on Wi-Fi (using the QR code)*Note* this was done in a classroom on 1 Meru AP pushing out a/b/g
The students all hold there QR code up to the webcam and it signs them in. about 7-10 students in the connection starts to really degrade and students are getting hung up on logging in or the webpage they're trying to access times out. I noticed when the students are signing in im getting pings from the AP in the 200-2000ms range and i am dropping packets. eventually i can get everyone at least signed in, but then the connection is so poor you can't load any apps, or web pages for that matter.
Troubleshooting:
Note: the tests performed were done on several maru AP's (all the same model, firmware version, etc.)
Called clever and tried to see if there were addresses that needed to be whitelisted for clever SSO (there were 3 IP's)
Tested the two different models on 3 different AP's (all AP's are the same and had the same settings) on 3 different channels and got the same results
After hours, we shut down all of the AP's in the building and tried to connect them to just a single AP (got the same results) we also tested it with different wireless security because we were told clever for whatever reason my not like WPA2-PSK-TKIP so we used WPA2-PSK-CCMP instead.
Checked RSSI levels with Acrylic Wi-Fi Professional and all the chromebooks had great signal. -40 - -50
Checked to make sure the chromebooks weren't bouncing to other neighboring AP's
Turned off the content filter and opened up the wi-fi to see if the chromebooks would be able to connect (still didn't work)
There's a lot more that we tried as well but still cant get the chromebooks to connect up to the wireless and be efficient using the Clever QR SSO. If anyone has any information that may be useful please send it my way. I have also contacted maru support and sent them multiple wireless pcaps of when we're replicating the issue and they have been completely useless. they just keep messing with band steering and the power levels.
