Network – Mac-WiFi

24 November 202327 November 2023

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.

16 November 2023

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.

12 June 2023

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?

10 September 202110 September 2021

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

8 April 2021

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.

5 March 20215 March 2021

What is an Aruba Virtual AP?

TL;DR – in oversimplified terms a Virtual AP (VAP) is what other vendor kit calls an SSID (or WLAN in Cisco speak). Read on if you need more than that.

19 November 2020

WLANPi Wireshark sshdump error

I wanted to use the WLANPi as a remote Wireshark capture adapter for the first time recently so I got stuck in. However, I hit an error that returned very little information when I googled it. Once I’d been shown the resolution I figured I’d document it here to help others (and no doubt myself when this happens again).

12 February 202012 February 2020

Convert Aruba Central AP to Campus AP

As I started playing around with Aruba kit I found myself wanting to change the two lab AP’s I had from Instant AP’s, to Central AP’s and then to Campus AP’s. I could find instructions on taking Instant AP’s to Campus AP’s, or Instant AP’s to Central AP’s, but I could not find instructions for taking a Central AP to a Campus AP. Having figured it out I wanted to document it to help others.

TL;DR:
1. Unsubscribe AP(s) from Central
2. Open local web UI on the AP
3. Go to Maintenance > Convert

30 September 201912 February 2020

802.11r Fast Transition not working in your Cisco home lab?

I wanted to test out and analyse Fast Transition in my Cisco home lab but at the first attempt it did not work – the clients were doing full Dot1X authentication each roam. Everything on the SSID/WLAN looked correct, and the clients were connecting/roaming ok, so it wasn’t a certificate or security setting issue.

Thankfully it didn’t take long to figure it out, but I wanted to put this short post together so that hopefully it takes you even less time.

26 July 201917 November 2020

Cisco’s 802.11r/FT settings & Adaptive mode explained

I see questions come up more and more often around Cisco’s Fast Transition settings (aka FT or 802.11r). In particular mixing non-FT and FT clients on the same SSID, and the role of Adaptive mode. I myself totally misunderstood how their FT Adaptive mode worked until two weeks ago.

There is an awesome culture within Vocera of doing as much as we can to provide guidance to our customers, even when that means providing assistance on another vendors equipment. One such opportunity occurred two weeks ago when a customer wanted to use our voice clients with Fast Transition (the IEEE’s feature name for the 802.11r amendment), but had older Cisco phones on the same SSID that do not support FT. We spun up our lab to test it out and these are the findings.