OS X Lion and Wifi
Today I had to make a very difficult decision. At the beginning of the year we updated most of our student computers in one building to OS X Lion. Our district participates in the Apple program to get the latest updates for all Apple software and the move to Lion was a natural step.
In the beginning I noticed some problems with Wifi staying connected. My computer would randomly drop the wifi connection and sometimes just seemed to just “hang” a bit. I knew from experience that with the first version of a major software upgrade sometimes you have to put up with a few bugs. All in all, though, it was a good trade because I really did (and do) like Lion.
Shortly after the problems seemed to increase in frequency, 10.7.1 came along that had a fix to supposedly solve the wifi issues. For the computers I used regularly, it did solve them. For others, we had a few workarounds such as PRAM and SMC reset, removing the network and adding it again, changing the location, adding odd DNS entries, believe me, we tried them all. For most machines, various gyrations of this solved the issues and they have remained trouble free. Once in a while I run into issues where my computer will not connect after waking up, but that is the exception.
We had some lingering issues with student MacBooks (which are different models – Late 2009) and sometimes entire classes would be put on hold because of the issues of this dropping wifi and the inability to log in. It has finally reached a critical point because the MacBooks are just not getting used because they don’t work. This was a critical problem because this was why we decided on Apple for our student computers, they were very low maintenance and reliable. For the past two years, they have been and I have become quite the Apple snob.
Today, I sat during an entire period and discovered the login issues we had in one particular class were due to corrupted mobile accounts on the local computer. That was a simple fix, delete the mobile account, have the student sign on again to re-create the account and we were back in business. Certainly, this is not the best situation, but one with a simple fix. The computers stayed connected during the entire hour and we thought we had a solution. I was pleased because I thought we had finally resolved it.
The next class period rolled around, and the wifi disconnected on most of the students before they could even log in. What makes this more difficult is that the wifi would reconnect if I logged in with the local administrator account. However, when you rely on a directory server to authenticate network users, that doesn’t do a whole lot of good. Determined to figure out why Lion was doing this, I pulled out every one of the machines and tried to update them one last time just to make sure that we were on 10.7.2 and all new updates. Long story short, I couldn’t even stay connected long enough to complete downloading updates.
After about 30 minutes of this, I made the decision to take them all back to Snow Leopard. I imaged about five computers, tested them out, and no problems whatsoever. I was not at all surprised, but I was extremely disappointed. I feel like we are going backwards and I don’t know what other option we have. Just limping along like this is not an option. It doesn’t seem to affect anything and nothing has changed with our wifi infrastructure. The common problem is Lion and there is just no way around it. We have made a significant investment in technology and it all needs to work like it did before. When a student grabs a notebook, they should open it up and log in.
Today I imaged the entire 30 machines in that cart back to Snow Leopard and we will make plans to do the same for the remaining 60-90 machines that have Lion. I had already determined that our XServe would not be making the jump to Lion any time soon because the server version of Lion is not what I had hoped. I had such high hopes for our student computers and the ability to use some of the features in Lion. I remain a Lion fanatic on my work and home computers, but for our students, not so much.
Apple, if you read this, I am begging you to figure this out. There is no explanation I can see, and the forums are full of this same type of complaint. Nothing has changed with hardware or configuration and yet we see these problems. I will be here waiting for a fix and be the first one to try it out.