Resolving iPhone wireless dropouts with DD-WRT

I use a couple of Linksys DD-WRT based routers in my home network and have done so for a few years. I love the flexability of advanced options like radius and the reliability I recieve from these devices.

I recently began experiencing some problems with iPhone connections being unreliable, especially after the router had an uptime of over 8 hours. A reboot of the router fixed the problem but rebooting the router every day isn't my idea of a resolution.


The settings that worked

These settings are a mix of settings from around the web, since combining these I have had perfect reliability with my iPhones.

1. Login to your DD-WRT device.

2. Click the 'Wireless' tab.

3. Click the 'Advanced Settings' tab.

4. Adjust the following settings.

Beacon Interval 50

Fragmentation Interval 2304

RTS Threshold 2305

The key setting is adjusting the Beacon Interval from the default of 100 to 50. The other two settings I couldn't see any differences but they didn't negatively impact performance so I left them.

5. Click 'Save' and then 'Apply Settings'.

I tested these settings on a Linksys WRT54G running v24 SP1 Micro and a Linksys WRT150N running v24 STD and there was no negative performance impact on my other devices (laptops, iPad, etc).

The only other settings I adjusted was TX Power to 84, but that was just to cover a larger area in my home and is totally optional.

Ensure you do your own before and after performance comparisons, but as far as I can tell these settings only bring gained stability.

iPhone native twitter app is not displaying mentions under the @connect tab

Recently my twitter stopped updating mentions under the @connect tab in the default iPhone twitter application. Initially I thought it was just me but after a quick google search I found a number of users were experiencing the same problem.

After first trying to restart and then playing with a number of settings I was unable to resolve the problem, but the following process worked.


The Fix

1. Open the Settings menu.

2. Select Twitter.

    

3. Click on the account that is causing you a problem, in my case it is "@teamau"

4. Click "Delete Account". This doesn't delete your twitter account, but just clears the account from your iPhone.

5. Click "Add Account" and re-add the account you just deleted.

Voila, your @mentions should be working again!

Connecting to Lync Mobility without autodiscover DNS

Recently the long awaited release of Lync 2010 Mobility pack hit the web along with clients for Android, Windows phone and the iPhone. The setup process is a little convoluted, as with anything Lync related, but is fairly straight forward none the less.

We deployed the mobility pack with the idea of giving key staff access to the Lync client within our network boundaries. This process would involve manual installation and configuration of the Lync client on these phones and we have a tricky split-brain setup, so we purposely didn't configure the autodiscover DNS.

When we configured a test client with what we through was the correct internal URL, it just hung forever at the signing in screen. Furthermore the great logging tool for the iPhone client gave us no indication of what the problem was. Everything in the log seems normal until the last line.

Lync[231:707]  is not a valid email address.

We tested the configuration using the Test-CsMcxP2PIM powershell script which returned successful, no problems there.

The Resolution

I feel so stupid, the problem was the URL we were entering into the manual internal address field on the iPhone client. After digging for a long time we finally found the URL buried in a Microsoft TechNet article while looking for something else.

https://<IntPoolFQDN>/AutoDiscover/AutoDiscover.svc/Root

The above address is the correct URL to enter into your iPhones "internal discovery address" field if you are not using autodiscover services. As soon as we changed the configuration of the iPhone client, everything worked perfectly. This is as much a note to remind myself how stupid I am as anything.