13", 2018 MacBook Pro issues with Kensington Dock

[bigow29]

I am at a loss. I have a Kensington dock (SD5300T Thunderbolt 3). It's great and I love it, but it has one major issue: my internet connection fails for ~10 sec every 10-30 minutes. This has caused huge frustrations, especially while watching live, streamed video; making Zoom calls; uploading content; etc. The full setup: 13" MacBook Pro connected via thunderbolt, Dell S2718D via HDMI, Ethernet in, wireless keyboard via USB, audio aux out.

I do this same setup at my house with a $20 Amazon dock that requires power in via the in-the-box apple charger, but no issue with connectivity.

I have been sent a second SD5300T and have the same issues. I was told that I should "try it on another laptop" and sure I will, but I don't think it will solve anything. Does anyone have thoughts? Am I doing something wrong? Is this a MacBook Pro issue?

Also, yes I am running DockWorks and Wi-Fi is turned off.

Thanks!

 

[junk430]

I have this exact same dock and this exact same issue. I had the dock for over a year and it's worked great until a couple months ago and it started dropping internet. It does not matter if the ethernet is disconnected it still drops the internal WiFi. I had logs collected and showed support but they didn't have much to offer. They also didn't have any replacements and just refunded my money.
I have a feeling there is nothing wrong with the dock but something changed in OSX. It's to bad they didn't want to look into it and just refused my money.
I'm now using my micro dock I was using in my laptop bag and I'm find with it so I'll just keep using it.

 

[mbaran]

Apologies for the age old bump, but did either of you ever resolve this with your SD5300T? I have the same issue.

 

[gleeSC]

Have spent hours troubleshooting this today. I have a very similar issue. Kensington SD4750P running on a mac with Ventura 13.5.2. This started weeks ago and has been driving me absolutely mad. As reported above, it is causing the wifi on the mac to drop off about every 15 minutes even without an Ethernet connection made to the Kensington dock.

To test this, I swapped the mac that was dropping every 15 minutes and had it sit standalone on wifi. It has yet to drop the same wifi connection that was dropping every 15 minutes and has been running for over 30.

And the mac swapped into its place, which had been running stand alone just fine with no dropped connections, is now dropping the network.

This docking station was fairly solid in the past.

But something has changed to the point that trying to run a video conference is now impossible at work.

I just turned "Enable wifi auto switch" off to see if that could in any way make a difference. Will let that soak and run for awhile and see.

If anyone on this thread has similar experiences or solution, please shout.

Thanks

 

[gleeSC]

I am fairly confident the culprit at least for me is the "Enable WiFi Auto-Switch" setting on the Mac DockWorks client running on the Mac.

I turned this setting off.

And have now been running without ANY WiFi drops for almost an hour.

The log file before this change is shown below. Fairly replicable pattern of dropping every 15-30 minutes on either WiFi OR Ethernet (wired through the dock with WiFi turned off). And I could repeat on a second Mac as noted above.

No other PC on this LAN is exhibiting dropped connections in the same time period, and log files on the routers do not show any issues with DHCP or lost connections. It appears isolated to ONLY the machine connected to the Kensington dock.

This appears to be a bug.

Also note, this started appearing when I had Ethernet running through a USB dongle on the Mac. I was consistently losing connectivity. Switching to WiFi only did not solve the problem. To further troubleshoot, I moved the Ethernet to the dock and that's when I discovered the auto-switch option which led me down this path.

Have no idea what Kensington is sending down the line to the Macbook periodically when that feature is turned on, but it sure appears to be causing havoc with keeping connections on WiFi or Ethernet.

I am running DockWorks 1.2.11 on Ventura 13.5.2 on a MacBook Pro M2 CPU and DockWorks 1.2.11 on Ventura 13.5.2 on a MacBook Pro M1 CPU.

This started as Apple's OS has evolved over the last year- not sure this is a MX CPU issue, but who knows. I do know when I FIRST installed this dock, it was stable with the M1-based Mac.

I will report to Kensington.

NOTE: Log below created from output from Chrome Extension Internet Connection Monitor 4.0.1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/internet-connection-monit/hgccfdagfbilbdbkgmfdmmdfmjjoakfo

No lost connection since disabling this software setting on the mac to NOT do any Auto-Switch.

ALSO worth noting, that for a Mac NOT connected to the docking station still having this feature turned on, it did not lose connection either. So the bug is somewhere only in a Mac physically connected to the dock.

Hope this helps anyone else pulling their hair out.

Log
Date and time	Status	Status duration
9/16/23 13:18​	Online
9/16/23 13:18​	No Internet connection	0:00:08​
9/16/23 13:04​	Online	0:14:29​
9/16/23 13:03​	No Internet connection	0:00:08​
9/16/23 12:49​	Online	0:14:34​
9/16/23 12:49​	No Internet connection	0:00:08​
9/16/23 12:48​	Online	0:00:26​
9/16/23 12:48​	No Internet connection	0:00:02​
9/16/23 12:24​	Online	0:23:51​
9/16/23 12:24​	No Internet connection	0:00:01​
9/16/23 12:01​	Online	0:23:39​
9/16/23 12:01​	No Internet connection	0:00:02​
9/16/23 11:46​	Online	0:14:31​
9/16/23 11:46​	No Internet connection	0:00:07​
9/16/23 11:31​	Online	0:15:30​
9/16/23 11:30​	No Internet connection	0:00:09​
9/16/23 11:01​	Online	0:29:24​
9/16/23 11:01​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 10:46​	Online	0:14:42​
9/16/23 10:46​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 10:32​	Online	0:14:40​
9/16/23 10:32​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 10:17​	Online	0:14:54​
9/16/23 10:17​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 10:02​	Online	0:14:38​
9/16/23 10:02​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 9:47​	Online	0:14:37​
9/16/23 9:47​	No Internet connection	0:00:03​
9/16/23 9:33​	Online	0:14:25​

 

[pierreSpierre]

Thank you SO much gleeSC!!! I have been chasing my ISP, Fibre Network provider and just about everyone about my zoom, slack and internet connections dropping what seemed to be randomly. It did not happen at work and only at home on my Wifi Network (at my desk) where there was bad Wifi signal due to the distance from the router. When I connect a LAN cable it works. I finally added a Wifi Mesh network to sort the signal at my desk but alas the problem still continued...

A colleague and I finally discovered the following in /var/log/wifi.log on my MacOS Sonoma 14.1.1 (date time stamp removed) every more or less 17 minutes:

Usb Host Notification Error Apple80211Set: Device power is off seqNum 2453 Total 7 chg 1 en0
Usb Host Notification Error Apple80211Set: Device power is off seqNum 2454 Total 7 chg 1 en0
Usb Host Notification Apple80211Set: seqNum 2455 Total 7 chg 1 en0
Usb Host Notification Apple80211Set: seqNum 2456 Total 7 chg 1 en0

A colleague find your post and once I disabled the "Enable WiFi Auto-Switch" on the Kensington DockWorks client finally the problem went away!!! Yaaaay!!!

So much appreciate the post you made.

I have raised a Kensington Support issue for this MOST annoying problem!!! Please fix this as I don't know how many other Kensington SD4700P users will have calls dropped every 17 minutes while using a Kensington Hub...

 

[gleeSC]

Glad my report helped as I too was pulling my hair out. I am VERY disappointed in Kensington's response. The completely ignored the report I gave them that in my opinion points to a bug in their stack and offered me a canned response for RMAing the device etc. Complete and utter nonsense for what points to a problem with their stack.

Will make me think twice about buying Kensington again.

Best of luck to you. Thankful my pain was able to alleviate yours.

 

[waqasars]

Glad my report helped as I too was pulling my hair out. I am VERY disappointed in Kensington's response. The completely ignored the report I gave them that in my opinion points to a bug in their stack and offered me a canned response for RMAing the device etc. Complete and utter nonsense for what points to a problem with their stack.

Will make me think twice about buying Kensington again.

Best of luck to you. Thankful my pain was able to alleviate yours.

@gleeSC How can i Enable WiFi Auto-Switch as i dont see this option in my macbook?