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I recently got an iPhone 4. At home, it connected to our wifi and worked perfectly. Now I am at school. My iPhone is now connected to the wifi here, it says that it is connected and has strong wifi signal. However apps that require internet like email, Facebook app, and online games (like words with friends, etc) load and stall showing "updating". All apps are unable to actually update. It shows it is loading for forever.

What can I do to fix this?

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ios uses several ports that most firewalls block. sorry i can't be more specific at the moment, but I had to get my sysadmin to unblock about 4 ports for stuff like facebook, google voice and facetime to work. I found the list of ports online, but I can't remember what they are, sorry – user14284 Nov 29 '11 at 2:39
Do your school wifi require you to log in before you get full access? – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Nov 29 '11 at 10:20
Which app is updating? Can you browse the web using Safari as soon as you join the network to see if a better error message can be seen? – bmike♦ Jul 3 '12 at 15:38

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Go to Settings, then Network. Select your network. Click the accessory button to see the network settings.

If you don't have an IP address, scroll down and tap "Renew Lease".

If you have an IP address that is a 168... number, it means you are not getting an IP address from the school's server. You'll need to contact their sysadmins.

Hope this helps.

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1  
169.254.*.* – Jason Salaz♦ Nov 29 '11 at 9:41
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Try using Safari and see if it shows some sort of login page for the school's network. Then see if you can browse your school's internal web site. If so, maybe the school is running some sort of firewall.

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It's very possible that your school requires a proxy server for internet access - you can confirm this by checking a machine that has internet access.

On your phone, you can configure the proxy settings in Settings -> Wi-Fi Networks -> Your network -> HTTP Proxy.

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up vote 0 down vote

Your iPhone and iOS in general simply uses DHCP to request an IP address and routing information on every network it joins.

In the case where the device works on other networks, it's extremely rare for the phone to then misbehave on one specific network.

Have you gone through the troubleshooting steps (see the link below)? It's good form to try these, but you may need to contact someone who knows if your network uses proxy servers, filtering or authentication to prevent new devices from using the network to access the internet. Just joining a network means your phone has connected to the radio - not that you have a clear path to the internet (without ports being blocked) or even a viable routable IP address to use the local network.

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