Meraki - Miracast interference issue?

[PietervdB]

Hi All,

We are experiencing a weird issue with our Samsung miracast enabled TV's and our Meraki setup. 

Tv's are undiscoverable until we Turn off the 5 Ghz radio of the nearby Meraki access points. 

Since Miracast uses P2P wifi I thought it had something to do the with Miracast 5Ghz channels used for discovery of the Miracast devices. 

This lead me to think the autochannel feature on Meraki was the culprit, so I disabled all but 2 channels on the nearby access points but to no avail. I also tinkered with a lot of other settings in the radio settings page of the Meraki dashboard but none of those options really made a difference. 

So for now we have turned off the 5 Ghz band so people can use the Miracast functionality straight from our Windows 10 machines but of course we would like to use the full radio spectrum available. 

I'm running out of ideas here. Do any of you have come accross the same issue? 

Kind regards,

Pieter

[ww]

Any  chance  air marshal is doing or reporting something?

[PietervdB]

Hi ww,

Thanks for answering. 

Air Marshal found the Miracast devices,but we haven't set it up to do anything with rogue ap's so they just got marked as "uncontained". To make sure Air Marshall wasn't the problem I've whitelisted the Miracast devices.

Again, same result, the Miracasts were not found until I switched off the 5 GHz band...

Kind regards, 

Pieter

[chadspecht]

Hello - curious to hear if any resolution besides killing the 5g spectrum has worked? We are in the same scenario, as we have all our conference room TV/displays using Microsoft Wireless Display Adapters. Laptops will seemingly connect after initial power on, and then disconnect and never re-connect again.

PietervdB - I have setup a test profile, which is turning off 5g on all WAP's in the building and am going to test this tomorrow.

Thanks to all.

-Chad

[PietervdB]

Hi Chad,

Unfortunately no, I did not find a proper way to get it working without disabling 5Ghz in the Meraki network. Also good to know you tried using widi adapters, my next step was to buy a bunch of Miracast dongles and see if that works. 

Guess not 🙂 

I did however have a so called "AirServer" lying around which is basically an intel nuc which supports Miracast, Airplay and Chromecast. I've tested this with the 5G network on, and for the last few months it kept running smoothly and I was able to use the Windows 10 miracast function every time. 

I did open a case with Cisco back in februari but then Covid came along and I was not at the office when they reached out to me, and tbh i haven't put any more time in this. 

Should you happen to come across a working solution, please let me know! 

Kind regards, 

Pieter

[chadspecht]

Pieter -

Here's what I ended up doing this morning and seems to be holding so far:

1. turned off 5G radios; didn't seem to make a difference

2. using Air Marshal, I enabled "Allow clients to connect to rogue SSIDs by default"

3. was able to find was SSID was getting contained; Microsoft's "Connect" feature in Win10 creates a temporary SSID with a MAC address, Air Marshal then contains it.

4. I whitelisted the WiDi MAC address from the laptop and viola, no more dropped connections.

5. I've whitelisted 3 more various flavors of laptops (Microsoft, Lenovo) and am having success with them all.

Kinda sucks this way, but at least we have a working solution for us. I do hope this helps and best of luck!

Take care,

Chad

[PietervdB]

Hi Chad, 

I hope this fixed the problem for you. I remember when I was tinkering with the Meraki settings, sometimes it would just start to work again and held up for a couple days, I hope this is not the case with your setup. 

Thanks for the useful information regarding the Air Marshal setting, I will make sure to try that out and whitelist our Dell laptops' WiDi MAC addresses sometime next week. Will keep you posted!

Have a great weekend, 

Pieter

[PietervdB]

Hi Chad,

How did the Air Marshall configuration keep up? 

I noticed I had already whitelisted the WiDi addresses before but to no avail. 

Cheers, 

Pieter

[chadspecht]

Hi Pieter,

It seems to be holding up well, although I haven't had to use it a lot in the last week.

I also haven't asked the users of the other devices I've whitelisted, but I haven't heard anything from them (which is a good thing!). I will continue to monitor and let you know!

Hope it works for you.

Take care,

Chad

[chadspecht]

Wanted to follow-up with a discovery we've had on this. The MAC whitelisting has worked on several Microsoft Surface models, and a few Lenovo ThinkPad's. We have one Dell Latitude 3379, with Intel 7265 NIC that still will not work. It  initially connects to the WiDi adapter and screen, but then disconnects within 10secs. Air Marshall shows that it's whitelisted when it sees it within the Dashboard. Head scratching moment for sure....

[chadspecht]

Another follow-up: this continues to work well for us as a solution. Although tedious, we are able to one-by-one add a new laptop's WiDi adapter to the Air Marshall whitelist and have it remain connected. It would be extremely helpful to be able to leave a note/comment about who's MAC address was added, and very extremely helpful if we could get it to whitelist through to all networks.  😉 

[Boredneil]

I found a post that fixed the problem for me.

In the Air Marshall, add an entry for Matches Wildcard and put the value of 'DIRECT-*' (without quotes).  This solved my problem with miracast.   If you look in the WLAN-autoconfig logs, the miracast tries to connect with a SSID that begins with DIRECT-.   I hope this helps someone out because it caused me a bunch of headaches.

Neil

[Trisha]

So SSID allow list and add allow if matches exactly DIRECT-* and I should be good?