Hi I work at a school with about 1000 windows 8.1 enterprise laptops with about 4 different models.
In the last 3 months we have had an issue arise that causes machines to loose connection to the network. They are unable to ping/file transfer/anything involving direct traffic. We have tried moving the machines to different wireless networks to make sure its not our wireless causing the issue(it still occurs). When they are in this failed state they are still showing as connected to the wireless, and checking the controller they are still connected.
Looking at wireshark traffic while in this failed state shows only multicast and broadcast packets, no direct traffic goes in our out of the machine.
It seems to be completely random as to when it happens. Sometimes can take as little as 1 minute after connecting to disconnect from the network. We have noted that doing a file copy does aggravate the issue. It is happening on all of our laptop models(that contain different brands).
The issue does seem to spread. We have tried installing a straight 8.1 install to see if we can get the issue to occur(which it does not) until placed on a network with other machines that this error is occurring on(this can happen on our network or on other networks).
We have tried looking for viruses, software causing problems, have had no real consistency other than in the end everything ends up with the same issue. Some models seem to be more prone than others at causing the problem and our updated deployment defiantly happens consistently.
Looking through error logs there is nothing significant standing out at the exact times the problem occurs.
Any thoughts any ideas would be greatly appreciated.