Running & logging multiple iPerf services on the WLAN Pi

Yesterday we had some fun at the first UK Wi-Co Community event in London. I wanted to run some throughput tests of OFDM and OFDMA and don’t have enough devices to do it myself at home, so I stepped up in front of a live studio audience for some community participation.

As often happens with live testing in front of an audience I had what the kids call an Epic Fail. The setup and testing worked fine at home with the 1 device I tried with… but what this iPerf newbie did not realise about iPerf3 is that it only allows 1 client connection per port. So 1 person got going and 9 others started shouting back to me that ‘the computer said no’.

Thankfully the amazing Jiri Brejcha was in the audience and, during a break, gave me the commands needed to set multiple iPerf instances running and logging on the WLAN Pi ready for a repeat attempt at lunch. I’m documenting this here before I forget it, for my benefit more than anyone elses. But perhaps you are onsite having made the same assumption I did and this can save your bacon. Be warned, its console commands, you can’t do this in the UI, so you’ll need SSH access to the WLAN Pi.

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How to set channel widths in Aruba Central (Nov 2023)

I’ve started playing with Aruba Central and AOS10 to check out how our Vocera badges function on it and to learn a little more about it so I can assist our customers when they need it. In general our badges have a very good voice experience on Aruba WLAN’s and I’ve been impressed with how smooth the audio is when roaming compared to some other WLAN vendors. But when it comes to Aruba Central I only seem to hear negative opinions about how hard it is to use.

Personally I had a very impressive experience with Aruba Central (with AOS8) when I had to rely heavily on it for an upgrade project during my brief employment at HPE in 2020. But I was only using a very small and particular piece of Central to rinse-and-repeat a multi-store upgrade. Yesterday when trying to configure something pretty fundamental to Wi-Fi, Channel Widths, I think I experienced the frustration others have with the interface, and no amount of Googling could find the answer in HPE Aruba’s documentation or anyone else’s. So here I am writing it up hoping this saves someone else the hour I spent searching, clicking and sighing.

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Fix for Meraki showing Unfriendly NAT on pfSense network

This is a quick blog to get out there what I discovered fixing this issue last week. My work issued me a Meraki Z3 for remote connectivity from home. Although it could talk to the cloud-hosted Meraki dashboard it could not establish the VPN between my house and the office for me to access resources. This confused me because I allow trusted network devices unrestricted access to the internet, so why couldn’t it “dial home” to bring the VPN up?

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How to use WLANPi as a capture adapter in Wireshark 4.x on Windows

This is a very quick article to help anyone trying to setup the WLANPi as a capture adapter in Wireshark 4. I only tried it with the WLANPi Pro and Wireshark 4.0.1 on my Windows 10 laptop, so apologies if your experience differs, but I’m hoping this post contains enough info to get you started if you’ve never done this before.

This post also assumes your WLANPi has an IP address and you can SSH to it from the Wireshark laptop. It may be possible to connect to the WLAN using the USB-OTG or some other means but I’ve not tested it and will only be looking at the SSH method here.

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How to force recalibration of Hive Heating TRV without losing the schedule

Here is another little knowledge nugget I’ve pieced together from various sites because I couldn’t find a single answer anywhere else.

TL;DR – Hold down button on TRV for about 3 seconds until it enters install mode and then hold it down again for another 3 seconds until it exits install mode. Give it a minute and then refresh the TRV in the Hive app to see the ‘Requires Calibration’ button.

My heating has been off all summer and it wasn’t working particularly well last winter (thanks Hive, your TRV’s suck!). I’ve also had a new central heating pump and mid-position valve installed since. So I wanted to have all my Hive Heating TRV’s (Thermostatic Radiator Valves) recalibrate themselves in the hope of a better performance than last winter.

When I installed the valves the Hive app had a ‘Requires Calibration’ button under each one that forced a full calibration rather than waiting for it to learn over a day or two when the heating was on long enough. I wanted to get that button back but the only way I had found previously was completely removing the TRV from the app which also lost the schedule. Thankfully I found another way.

If you hold the button down on the TRV itself for about 3 seconds it goes into Install Mode (a flashing M on the screen and probably a motor whirring sound) which you will have used when you first set them up. Doing this wipes out all settings on the valve including its learnt calibrating info.

“But Andrew, you said this could be done without losing the precious schedule I spent hours setting up and tweaking!”

Yes I did. Without doing anything in the app now press and hold the button on the TRV again for about 3 seconds (you should hear the motor inside whir). Now the valve will come out of Install mode, connect to your Hive network, and because you didn’t change anything in the app it will recognise the valve and reapply its name and schedule.

You will find the ‘Requires Calibration’ button in the app at the bottom of the TRV settings.

As a total side note here is something I read on the Hive forum post linked above. Apparently the Hive TRV valves operate differently when in Schedule Vs Manual mode. They heat up quicker using Manual mode than they do using Schedule mode. So the advice a few people are giving (including Hive tech support themselves apparently) is to 1) stick all valves into Manual mode at 7c (Protect level), 2) Ensure Heat On Demand (HOD) is enabled on them all and 3) Use Alexa or Siri to build a schedule for your valves and control them that way. This is crazy that a 3rd party system might work better than Hives own one but over this weekend I’ll be setting it up and giving it a try!

Apple Wi-Fi for iOS profile “Failed to save logs”

When I find a resolution to an issue that there is very little help for or no record of on any other sites I like to throw out a quick and dirty blog article to help someone in the future. This is one of those.

Having installed the Apple Wi-Fi for iOS debugging profile I got the following error every time I tried to save some logs on my iPhone 12 Mini running iOS 14 .7.1

Failed to save logs
The Wi-Fi diagnostic logs were unable to be saved correctly.

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Hikvision Hilook flapping switch port

I just got a Hikvision Hilook IPC-D650H after hearing good things about the brand. First thing I did was plug it into my POE+ L3 core switch for configuring (instead of mounting up a ladder and then finding an issue like this one). I watched my DHCP server for it to take an address so I could jump onto the web console but nothing showed up. After a long wait and power cycling the camera I looked at the switch logs. There were no IP Helper events and the switch port was going offline/online about every 60 seconds (flapping).

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Why are my Wireshark Neighbor Report filters broken?

Just a short post to inform people that Wireshark have deprecated the filter ‘wlan.rm’ (which I presume stood for Radio Measurement) and moved the subfilters into ‘wlan.fixed’. This happened in Wireshark version 3.2.10.

For Neighbor Report Requests this is the change:
Old: wlan.rm.action_code == 4
New: wlan.fixed.action_code == 4

For Neighbor Report Responses this is the change:
Old: wlan.rm.action_code == 5
New: wlan.fixed.action_code == 5

My CWNE essays published

TL;DR – scroll to the bottom for links to my essays.

In 2020 I finally got around to applying for and being granted the accreditation of Certified Wireless Network Expert (CWNE) from CWNP.

Now that this monkey was off my back I could smugly ask others what was taking them so long support others going through the application process. The most common road block I find people have about preparing their application is the 3 essays you need to submit. But the essays really don’t need to be the PHD worthy material everyone scares themselves into thinking is required. For that reason I am publishing my CWNE essays below for others to use as a reference or benchmark.

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How to verify whether 802.11k and 11r are enabled (via a capture)

I was chatting with my old colleague and friend Vince Folk from Vocera recently when he challenged me to name the Information Elements you would find 802.11k/r settings in.

Immediately my smugness shot to Maximum because this is something I’m very familiar with, you might even have seen my WLPC EU 2019 video analysing 802.11k/r/v. However, as the biotic hamsters in my dusty shell of a skull scurried around trying to find the grey matter holding this information my smugness waned.

When Vince finally put me out of my misery the IE names did not ring a bell with me. Not a single one! So the only reasonable course of action was to blog about it, to cement it into the aforementioned grey matter, and hopefully help someone else out too.

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