Windows clients unable to connect to secure wi-fi

Our corporate network has a global wi-fi solution that uses Cisco access points, PEEP and AD authentication.  Users can walk into any office in the world and use their AD credentials to authenticate to wi-fi.  It's a nice little set up.

We also use Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) for anti-virus; this will become relevant in a moment.

Some users were reporting that their Windows 7 laptops were unable to connect to our corporate WiFi.  Clicking on "connect" did nothing but pop-up a window saying "Unable to connect."

After digging through the logs we found that the user's credentials were not being passed to the access points.  We attempted to set-up the connection manually and found that the Microsoft Protected EAP (PEEP) option was missing from the "Choose a network authentication method:"

It turns out that SEP was modifying Registry keys and telling Windows the default location of the SymRasMan.dll was C:\Program Files\ Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection \  instead of the correct %SystemRoot%\System32\rastls.dll.

The fix we used to resolve the issue is detailed in this MS KB article.

Note: the article specifically refers to this problem occurring on computers that have had SEP removed.  However, as far as we were aware the computers that had the issue never had SEP removed, only installed.

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.