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Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

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Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#71

Post by anilv »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #15

I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

This is a good point, we’ll make sure to update the post to note that the advice is no longer needed once Apple fixes things on their end. The script will get killed with a simple restart, so the odds of this hanging around are low.

For companies that decide to implement this or a similar solution using MDM, `sudo pkill -f /tmp/disable_awdl.sh && sudo ifconfig awdl0 up` will also disable the effects of the script.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#72

Post by anilv »

moffatman wrote: post #32

I found just disabling these kind of Wi-Fi direct / local sharing features on macOS solved some latency I was seeing during online games. For example: Universal Control when enabled would cause the connection to choke for a few seconds when waking my iPad nearby.

We discovered that this very same, oddly specific advice was given in many places for gaming, like in Google Stadia’s troubleshooting page : https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9595943?hl=en#zippy...

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#73

Post by anilv »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #22

does this impact iOS wifi as well? My local HomeAssistant detects my phone on wifi for presence detection, and suddenly lately it's been all out of whack. it takes much longer to connect to wifi when I get home. and sometimes while home the presence status 'flickers', turning all the lights on/off. never used to happen

Yes, it does impact iOS and iPadOS too.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#74

Post by anilv »

acdha wrote: post #12

Any idea what the trigger is? This doesn’t happen normally so I’m wondering whether there some relationship with the vendor UCLA uses or some other network condition.

A previous commenter had this replicated live a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31706738 – in the video you can see how it’s triggered.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#75

Post by anilv »

varenc wrote: post #6

Their actual solution for disabling AWDL is running this script in the background: while true; do if ifconfig awdl0 |grep -q " That just checks the awld0 interface every second and turns it off if it's on. Apple really doesn't offer any other way to disable awdl? Note that setting AirDrop to "No One" doesn't fully disable awdl. It's used for other things like screen sharing, AirPlay, bonjour device/service discovery,…

There unfortunately is not a way to disable awdl in the UI apart from disabling bluetooth as well, which most don’t want. An increasing number of Apple services leverage awdl[1], and it’s unlikely they envision anyone wanting to turn it off.

[1] https://owlink.org/wiki/ — note, not exhaustive ex: tethering also leverages awdl.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#76

Post by anilv »

We have updated our post to make it easy to see the full source of the script involved, and we welcome PRs at https://github.com/meterup/awdl_wifi_scripts. We provide the curl command out of convenience, but we understand the trust that someone places in us when using this method. We’re also finding that IT teams are leveraging this script with tools like JAMF to address this for all of their company’s devices at once.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#77

Post by Spooky23 »

gavin_gee wrote: post #53
LeoPanthera wrote: post #15

I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

back in the day i used to support microsoft's ISA product (layer 7 firewall) customers would just not know what configuration they had made. so we had a bit of VBScript that would dump the entire config into a text file. amazing how many customers had left themselves open in bad ways in production systems and also how their perspectives of what was configured did or did not match reality.

That product was the worst. I remember they had a client that people wanted to install for some reason. In one case, the client would bypass some configuration that was supposedly critical and I got stuck in the middle of some crazy argument between security, network ops and support.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#78

Post by Spooky23 »

katbyte wrote: post #58
more_corn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just spent the last week diagnosing catastrophic Wi-Fi issues at a client location. 90% of macs wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, when they would association would take 45 seconds. Sometimes you couldn’t route or ping the gateway. When you could you’d get disassociated within a minute. Turning off the airdrop/anirplay interface fixes it instantly. sudo ifconfig awdl0 down It took us 5 days to figure it out. We had no less…

Sounds like a good argument for Ethernet and wired docks? I mean if millions are on the line why wouldn’t you ensure there is that backup there?

Apple makes weird changes that impact docks too. Something changed in Ventura where certain display modes just don’t work anymore.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#79

Post by chazeon »

saagarjha wrote: post #64
chazeon wrote: post #60

I do encounter weird Wi-Fi issues on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Not sure if it is related to this bug. Sometimes I am just unable to load any web pages, but I can ping those sites. I have to reboot it regularly to reconnect to the internet. The issue is most likely to occur after waking from sleep. The issue is so bad that I have to fall back to a Hackintosh at home. I originally was using an Intel-based WiFi card is gre…

Have you tried seeing if it connects in another browser?

Yes, none of the browser works.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#80

Post by jrmg »

chazeon wrote: post #60

I do encounter weird Wi-Fi issues on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Not sure if it is related to this bug. Sometimes I am just unable to load any web pages, but I can ping those sites. I have to reboot it regularly to reconnect to the internet. The issue is most likely to occur after waking from sleep. The issue is so bad that I have to fall back to a Hackintosh at home. I originally was using an Intel-based WiFi card is gre…

This symptom was occurring to me because I was on a network with a Pi-Hole, had Safari's "Hide IP address from trackers" on (which I think uses the iCloud Private Relay to get some resources usually delivered by CDNs that track), but the Pi-Hole was configured with the 'BLOCK_ICLOUD_PR' option on. Safari would just hand when it attempted to get those resources.
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