Lots of connectivity issues with Meraki Go

[ZachREC]

Hey everyone, new IT person here.

I inherited all IT responsibilities at my business a few months back despite not having any training or education regarding it. I've been learning as I go and have picked up quite a bit, however I cannot seem to figure out this issue we are having on our network.

I am using Meraki go, I have the older router (GX20), switch and 4 AP's all setup and they work great for the most part, however many users are getting this error:

WPA-PSK auth fail

Auth (RADIUS)

Will also occasionally get an association attempts error and no DHCP response error. Though, these usually work themselves out.

It'll let people connect to the wifi, but unfortunately won't have any actual internet connection. I have already reached out to support but thought I'd try the community too.

What can I do to fix this? Thank you!

[IanTerry]

Hi,

Did you ever get a resolution.

The errors you saw were they associated to Apple devices?

Those issues are generally a result of devices missing a registration and normally re-try successfully.

[ZachREC]

Hello,

Yes I did get some help to solve this from the support people and some of my own experimentation.

The majority of issues did stem from Apple products and users failing to update the passwords/forgetting the old network properly. Support also recommended having a password with no special characters, which seemed to help as well.

Also had some radio channel issues from a nearby business hogging up a bunch of channels, don't know if it's directly related, but improved the network quite a bit!

Thanks for the help!

[IanTerry]

Hey - that is really interesting! No special characters in a password, that needs to be investigated by Cisco! 

[ZachREC]

Right? I thought it was really odd to not have special characters! Seems like a potential security issue to me, but I am new to this whole thing. 

[IanTerry]

Exactly ! This needs confirmation.from Cisco

[hidden0]

Hello @IanTerry and @ZachREC 

We don't mind what characters are used in a PSK. The recommendation to not use special characters stems purely from a risk of typos increasing with special characters as compared to longer but easier to remember keys using familiar characters.

If you can reliably demonstrate that special characters in a PSK are causing connectivity issues, please open a support case with the supporting evidence that is the case (i.e. consistent failure with special characters, and consistent success without them).