Filed under: Bad Apple, iPhone
iPhones bedevil Duke
Well apparently things aren't so rosy with iPhones at Duke University. Their IT managers are reporting that iPhones are actually causing many of their wireless access points to shut down for 10-15 minutes each. Because of some sort of misconfiguration involving the Address Resolution Protocol the iPhones "flood the access points with up to 18,000 address requests per second, nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth, and [monopolize] the AP's airtime."The article notes that all of this is being caused by only ~150 iPhones, and the IT folks are worried about what's going to happen when the school year starts and hundreds, if not thousands more, show up on the campus network. Apparently the Duke folks are convinced the problem is not with their Cisco equipment and have been in contact with Apple, but they have not gotten much of a response. If this is in fact a problem with the iPhone's design we should expect to see more of this kind of thing on large wifi networks. Have any of you noticed any kind of problems like this on campus or at work?
[via MacVolPlace]
_thumbnail.jpg "Take a stroll down memory lane")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
blinkcowz182 said 8:45AM on 7-18-2007
My college's network uses LEAP authentication which the iPhone doesn't support. So, I couldn't tell you. :(
Reply
Alasdair Allan said 9:17AM on 7-18-2007
Well OSCON is next week, if it's real, it'll show up there. I remember a few years back (2003 maybe?) there was a bug in (what was then) Rendezvous and something similar happened to the WiFi network at OSCON. I think it took the collective great and the good about an hour into the first day of the conference to track it down an file the bug report with Apple.
Reply
nate w said 9:39AM on 7-18-2007
hey...i'm near duke...i should go take my iphone and shut down some APs, just for the heck of it.
Reply
Damien Guard said 9:53AM on 7-18-2007
I wonder if this is what Cisco had in mind when they licenced the iPhone name to Apple in return for working together on interoperability...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6384875.stm
[)amien
Reply
Sean Flanagan said 9:54AM on 7-18-2007
This was posted on Slashdot yesterday, and the consensus among the IT-experienced commenters there was that this isn't an iPhone issue, it's a network issue. It's most likely the result of using old hardware to handle ARP requests from wireless devices. Their reasoning was that if it were really an issue with the iPhone, it would have been reported by more than one organization. If that's the case, it seems like Duke will have more to worry about than just iPhones if they don't fix the problem before August.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/16/232258
Reply
ryry said 10:35AM on 7-18-2007
I work at Cisco.
My iPhone hasn't crashed our network.
Hell, I can't even get onto the network with anything but my Cisco supplied laptop.... our network is harder to break into than Fort Knox.
Reply
iJavaJoe said 10:46AM on 7-18-2007
Sean, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yesterday I contacted the network guy's at my local university, (I use to work there), and so far they've seen nothing. I also use to work at a local college and they to have seen nothing. Seems strange that only Duke would be seeing this, or at least reporting it. Obviously something is out of norm. Part of me wonders if someone didn't do a router software upgrade? or Apple is using some new communication standard that the old routers are not equipped to handle. Best have Cisco look at it as well, just in case!
Reply
Fred said 11:09AM on 7-18-2007
Even if there is a problem with the iPhone, what kind of network design is it that lets a client device affect it in this way?
Reply
Britboyj27 said 12:07PM on 7-18-2007
Mine has the attrocious Perfigo (now Cisco) SmartEnforcer for Windows machine but a simple logon for Mac-based machines.
I need to re-log in every time because the login in web-based and not a simple password WEP or whatnot, unlike at work or home where it remembers it.
However, no issues at all here.
Reply
Erick Erickson said 12:07PM on 7-18-2007
I had this problem with Cisco routers in the Covention Center in Orlando, FL two years ago. They said my Powerbook had a short in the wireless card causing it to overload the wireless network.
A friend who works at Cisco told me to download iStumbler and see what system was being used. When I told him, he said that is a Cisco problem with certain routers and not my Powerbook's problem.
I suspect the same thing here.
Reply
Seth said 1:50PM on 7-18-2007
Gonna have to second the Cisco router problem. We use an older one here at work and my MacBook + Boss's HP lappy both have authentication issues. Our network guy says it has to with the way in which the router interacts with the wireless card which apparently does not maintain a steady connection but is almost in constant 'wireless refreshment'.
About the iPhone, he said that Apple may have done it to save power and extend battery life by having the wireless switching on and off whenever it is needed. Newer routers can handle it. Old ones can't.
Reply
BobbyW said 10:29PM on 7-18-2007
I can't believe how many stories are on the net blaming this on the iPhone. Clearly it's a network problem. Like someone said, who lets their network fall victim to something like this. All the publicity simply shows that whoever runs the Duke network has screwed up.
Aside from that, why haven't we heard of this happening on the thousands of other wifi campuses around the country, corporate and academic?
Bad reporting
Reply
Snow said 10:51AM on 7-19-2007
I'm on Duke's campus every day, iPhone in tow. Frankly I haven't noticed the wireless network crashing more than usual. But they always had address request problems, well before the iPhone was more than a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye. My laptop (first a ThinkPad, now a MBP) would get booted at least once a day because of address problems. Seems like they'd hand my device's address to another device, and boot me. (Actually, I haven't seen that happen since I got the MBP.)
I'm no network admin, so I don't know exactly what's going on here, but my money is on Duke's network being at fault.
Reply