I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this.<p>People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then <i>forget</i> that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.
Their actual solution for disabling AWDL is running this script in the background:<p><pre><code> while true; do
if ifconfig awdl0 |grep -q "<UP"; then
(set -x; ifconfig awdl0 down)
fi
sleep 1
done
</code></pre>
That just checks the awld0 interface every second and turns it off if it's on. Apple really doesn't offer any other way to disable awdl?<p>Note that setting AirDrop to "No One" doesn't fully disable awdl. It's used for other things like screen sharing, AirPlay, bonjour device/service discovery, etc. Though perhaps disabling AirPlay is enough to stop the WiFi issues. You can sniff awdl traffic with `sudo tcpdump -i awdl0`
I stream at a pretty high bandwidth a remote system for gaming. I noticed this immediately. I disabled location sharing and it got a little better. I noticed that everytime my spouse started using his iPhone or opened his M2 Air to do something that my game stream seized. I guessed at something like this being the issue and disabled Airdrop. The problem immediately went away. I cursed about software quality in 2022 but also had a "HugOps" moment where, ... I get it. This stuff is hard stuff and most of the time I don't experience serious defects like this after upgrading OS X.<p>I still have an issue every now again and for whatever reason a reboot addresses it. I will ifconfig down the interface next time. I suspect that will resolve it.
That is absolutely the WRONG way to do this. You want people to download a shell script that then downloads another shell script, then runs that shell script via sudo? That second shell script could be changed at any time.
I was the IT manager for an all-Apple school, had just joined in 2014. First time overseeing that many users. New macOS and iOS versions came out. Hey guys, everyone can update! New versions out! Cool beans!<p>For half a year, it was WiFi and AirDrop hell. Update after update, it didn't matter, the issues were not being fixed. Finally, whichever update it was, fixed it 6 months later. I referred to it as the WiFi Apocalypse of 2014. After that, I always emailed everyone at the beginning of the school year to not install new versions of macOS and iOS when they came out. I would say that if they went against my recommendations and installed anyway, no guarantee that we'd be able to fix any problems they had, and this was their warning, so no complaining.<p>I would usually send an email about half a year later saying that people can update now if they like. I didn't care whether or not it looked fine within the first month or so. Never again. The WiFi Apocalypse of 2014 was hell. It's weird that this situation seems to be repeating itself.
I’ve been noticing this for a while. Both my laptop and my wife’s have this problem. Both are M1.<p>Both our iPhones <i>seem</i> to have similar issues.<p>I went mad trying to figure it out with my router/APs etc.<p>I was certain there is no way it could be Apple’s issue. But in hindsight this makes sense.<p>Especially so, if Apple is sharing some driver logic between M1 laptops and A16 SOCs on the phones.<p>Edit: I want to add that this most-noticably manifested as websites loading incompletely. Looking at the network tab, this would show some HTTP requests fail even before establishing a connection. Other requests were fine. So most sites were broken, or don't render correctly without css. Restart was the only fix.
We have updated our post to make it easy to see the full source of the script involved, and we welcome PRs at <a href="https://github.com/meterup/awdl_wifi_scripts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/meterup/awdl_wifi_scripts</a>. We provide the curl command out of convenience, but we understand the trust that someone places in us when using this method. We’re also finding that IT teams are leveraging this script with tools like JAMF to address this for all of their company’s devices at once.
I really don’t like that the page asks users to blindly curl and execute a script that then curl and executes another script all to run a one line `ifconfig` command.<p>Why not just share the command?
I do encounter weird Wi-Fi issues on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
Not sure if it is related to this bug.<p>Sometimes I am just unable to load any web pages, but I can ping those sites. I have to reboot it regularly to reconnect to the internet. The issue is most likely to occur after waking from sleep.<p>The issue is so bad that I have to fall back to a Hackintosh at home. I originally was using an Intel-based WiFi card is great; later, I switched to a Broadcom card to enable handoff / AirDrop / AirPlay. After switching, it seems to degrade internet stability. The symptom seems like it has something to do with awdl0, so it might get helped from the post.<p>All my Windows computers work with no issues on the same network. I followed some instructions online to change the MTU [1] it seems to fix the issue somewhat.<p>[1]: <a href="https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/177873/full-wi-fi-ethernet-signal-but-no-internet" rel="nofollow">https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/177873/full-wi-fi-...</a>
> Note: if you opt to not use the script and want to use the UI, you have to disable both Bluetooth and AirDrop.<p>Periodic reminder that Apple re-enables Bluetooth on every OS update: <a href="https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bluetooth.html" rel="nofollow">https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bluetooth.html</a>
I <i>really really really</i> wish that Apple would always use DHCP and get an open IP instead of assuming their last one is still good just so they can say they connect to WiFi 100 ms faster than anyone else. It is so infuriating and causes all the devices in my house to fight for their rightful slot.
I'm glad Meter published this post as I've been fighting this issue for the last couple of weeks and wasn't able to find much information on the root cause.<p>I started getting packet loss recently, and after being unable to find the cause,
I tried upgrading my router. That somehow made things worse -- rather than intermittent packet loss, it would get into a completely unavailable state and not recover. I couldn't even switch to other networks without restarting wifi.<p>This affected multiple M1 machines and an iPhone, so I was quite sure it was an Apple issue, but wasn't able to find the root-cause. After some limited testing, I'm pretty sure this issue caused both my intermittent packet loss as well as complete downtime.
I believe that the issue is real, but this article suggests a mind-bogglingly unsafe solution.<p>The steps include downloading a remote script, then entering the password of a privileged user.<p>Goodness, it would be a shame if someone were to change the contents of that remote script.
"Why isn't this happening at my home?
Unlike at home, in a commercial (office, warehouse, lab) environment there are many more demands placed on a Mac device’s WiFi radio as it is getting many more passive connection requests from other devices using the AWDL protocol. The more Apple devices you have on a network, the worse this issue gets."<p>Well, it might not happen to those rich Apple developers living in their mansions. It sure does happen to us plebes living in apartment complexes. Years ago my ThinkPad found 70 (!) WiFi networks next to me. AWDL is a nightmare here.
I found just disabling these kind of Wi-Fi direct / local sharing features on macOS solved some latency I was seeing during online games. For example: Universal Control when enabled would cause the connection to choke for a few seconds when waking my iPad nearby.
I had this issue today. Bandwidth was degraded to 1mbps download until I switched off Bluetooth. Repeated multiple times to ensure BT was the interference.<p>Then switching Wi-Fi to channel 11 seemed to stop interference and I had no problems after that.
Good to see that it's on the apple side and not on the side of my router configuration. It's really frustrating, and I have it several times a day.<p>Though, I wouldn't use their solution with the script.
Hoho, script in a script to run ifconfig only. Final reads this:<p>while true; do<p><pre><code> if ifconfig awdl0 |grep -q "<UP"; then
(set -x; ifconfig awdl0 down)
fi
sleep 1
</code></pre>
done
I've been working out of WeWork in SF and wifi as been completely unusable for the past week. It's been super frustrating to debug because some people have been able to connect totally okay.<p>Now that I know this is an issue mainly introduced my Apple on their silicon machines, I have some apologies to make to the WeWork staff.
does this impact iOS wifi as well? My local HomeAssistant detects my phone on wifi for presence detection, and suddenly lately it's been all out of whack. it takes much longer to connect to wifi when I get home. and sometimes while home the presence status 'flickers', turning all the lights on/off. never used to happen
Apple really should just add a 2nd wifi hardware for these background tasks, a similar issue occurs when the location service enumerates local wifi networks, leading to stutter and freezes while streaming real-time video. A cheap one would do.
Any idea what the trigger is? This doesn’t happen normally so I’m wondering whether there some relationship with the vendor UCLA uses or some other network condition.