WiFi Network Dropping Packets on a Mac

A MacBookPro running 10.9.4 was experiencing a problem where it would suffer constant connection drops on some WiFi networks with upwards of 70% packet loss.  Cable connections were fine and not all WiFi connections displayed this problem.

The WiFi router was replaced and a separate WiFi access point was tried and still the drops continued.  Other computers connected to the same WiFi network did not have this problem.

We resolved the issue by following these steps:

• Turn on WiFi on the Mac
• Open System Preferences/Network
• Highlight the WiFi connection and click on the "Advanced" tab
• Click on the "Wi-Fi" tab
• Remove the problematic network.  It might be a good idea to remove ALL the saved networks as long as the user knows the passwords for them!
• Click "OK" and then "Apply" to apply the changes
• Open Keychain Access
• Highlight the "Login" keychain
• Search for "Airport"
• Find the "AirPort network password(s)" that are associated with the problem network and delete them.  Note: there are normally two per network, "System" and "Local Items" Keychains
• Restart
• Log into the WiFi network and enter the authentication details when prompted

After removing the shared networks and deleting the items from the Keychain the packet loss stopped and normal WiFi connectivity was restored.

Unable to search the GAL in Lync 14 on 10.9 Macs

We have received many reports that OS 10.9 Macs using Lync 14 are unable to search the Global Address List (GAL).  When a name is entered into the search field no results are returned.

The root cause appears to be two missing files in the user's Microsoft Lync Data/[user's sip name] folder:  GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx

If a computer that was running Lync 14 was upgraded to 10.9 from 10.8 or earlier there is no problem searching the GAL from within Lync.  The problem occurs on 10.9 Macs with fresh Lync installs.

The fix is to copy GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx from a working computer to the non-workign 10.9 Mac.

• Install and configure Lync on the 10.9 Mac
• Log into Lync with the user's AD account credentials
• Close Lync
• On a computer that has a working Lync GAL go to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Microsoft Lync Data/
• Open the "sip_[user.name]@[domain.com]" folder.  ie: sip_tom.smith@mydomain.com
• Locate the GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx files and copy them to a USB stick or the network
• On the 10.9 Mac with the new Lync install go to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Microsoft Lync Data/sip_[user.name]@[domain.com] and import GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx files
• Launch Lync and test the GAL search