Authentication – Mac-WiFi

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.

19 February 201815 October 2018

What EAP type is it using?

As part of my role I assess existing WLAN’s for Voice support. During the survey I like to independently verify as much of the information I’ve been given as possible using protocol analysis.. One setting that I always struggled to find was the security in use, particularly when EAP / Dot1X was in use.

I had most of it figured out and was able to answer my last few questions when I took the CWAP course recently with Peter Mackenzie (@MackenzieWiFi). So here is a look at spotting the security in use on an SSID.

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