A quick post today. As you may recall, I run two Ruckus Wireless APs at home – a Zoneflex 7982 AP and a Zoneflex 7363 AP managed by a Zone Director 1106. The ZF7982 and ZD1106 were provided courtesy of Ruckus Wireless at NFD5, and have performed fantastically in my fairly large house – which is why I added my own ZF7363 to the mix! I also have a Cisco Meraki MR16 in the basement, but that’s another story.
This week I upgraded my MacBook Pro to OSX Yosemite, and my internet performance went down the toilet; it was awful. Cynicism fully engaged, I wondered whether my older Ruckus firmware (v9.5.1.0.50) might be part of the problem, so I checked for an update and found that v9.6.1.0.15 was available. I connected my laptop via the Meraki (which was running fine as it turned out), downloaded the code and uploaded it to the Zone Director.
Within a few minutes, the ZoneDirector had upgraded and rebooted and it began the process of upgrading the Zoneflex APs. 15 minutes from start to end and the upgrade of the controller and APs was complete. Shifting my WiFi connection back to the Ruckus, all was well again.
For good measure, I also found a firmware upgrade for the Meraki AP and scheduled it for an overnight installation where it wouldn’t interrupt anybody’s work.
So be warned – while it might have been tempting to blame Yosemite for the failure, it looks like it was an incompatibility between OSX and Ruckus which evidently was fixed one of the intermediate firmware updates. I don’t care which one, I’m just happy it’s all fixed! If you have deployed Ruckus APs and you have Mac users, you may want to upgrade your firmware.
30 Blogs in 30 Days
This post is part of my participation in Etherealmind’s 30 Blogs in 30 Days challenge.
I should add for clarity that I am not blaming Ruckus for this; I love my Ruckus wireless gear, and the latest firmware had no issues. The fault is mine for not having kept the firmware updated! However, there’s an important lesson in here for enterprises at least about lab testing prior to deployment. In the home environment on the other hand, where my network is also my lab (!), I have less opportunity for such things and tend to find out the hard way!