Lab – 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.

10 November 2022

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.

22 February 2021

Screwed up your Synology NAS network settings?

Today I made a stupid change to the network settings on my Synology NAS, and it resulted in the IP being inaccessible, and therefore the management interfaces (http/ssl) too. At first there was a short panic that I would have to reset something to get access, which really feels like using a hammer to crack a nut as the old saying goes. Then I thought of a simple back up route that got me in, so I thought I’d note it down to help someone else (or myself next time I do this).

(Side note: I do believe there is a type of reset you can do that just resets the network settings, but I’ve not tried it).

18 February 202118 February 2021

ESXi Autostart Start Delay, Stop Delay & Stop Action

I spent a lot longer than I would have liked today googling for more information on the ESXi Autostart options of Start Delay, Stop Delay and Stop Action. In the end my friend Keith’s Google-Fu was stronger than mine and he pointed me in the right direction. Because the articles we found (listed below) don’t use exactly the same terminology (hence me not finding the answers I wanted) I decided to summarise them here with the “correct” terminology of the latest ESXi 7.0 UI.

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.