WiFi Quality Monitoring
Good Morning, We have noticed that after ~4 months the quality of our Cisco wireless network sours. We will get reports of poor wireless quality from users sitting directly under an access point. Often the WCS will report users on the access points with good dBm, but in reality the users can barely search the web. (I cannot remember if the average client SNR was looked at). The solution is to reboot the access point. So, we now are now talking about scheduling a reboot of all access points and controllers (4400s) every 3 months. While this may work to keep the problem at bay, it does not address two related questions. 1. Why is this happening? When I mentioned this behavior to a Cisco TAC, they said they had never heard of this before. As this has been our norm through multiple code and access point upgrades, I cannot believe this. 2. What are other schools using to monitor the quality of the wifi? I do not mean the rf interference quailty but instead a way to monitor of how well the access points are passing traffic, signal strength, average client SNR, etc? Thank you, -- Christina Christina Klam Network Administrator Institute for Advanced Study Email: ck...@ias.edu Einstein Drive Telephone: 609-734-8154 Princeton, NJ 08540 Fax: 609-951-4418 ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] WiFi Quality Monitoring
I'm glad you asked this question. We seem to have the same issue though I had not thought of rebooting the APs controllers to help it. I hate to do this to 3500 Cisco APs and 24 controllers, but I might try it. Hopefully, we will hear from other folks who can shed more light on this subject. -jcw - John Watters UA: OIT 205-348-3992 -Original Message- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Christina Klam Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 8:33 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] WiFi Quality Monitoring Good Morning, We have noticed that after ~4 months the quality of our Cisco wireless network sours. We will get reports of poor wireless quality from users sitting directly under an access point. Often the WCS will report users on the access points with good dBm, but in reality the users can barely search the web. (I cannot remember if the average client SNR was looked at). The solution is to reboot the access point. So, we now are now talking about scheduling a reboot of all access points and controllers (4400s) every 3 months. While this may work to keep the problem at bay, it does not address two related questions. 1. Why is this happening? When I mentioned this behavior to a Cisco TAC, they said they had never heard of this before. As this has been our norm through multiple code and access point upgrades, I cannot believe this. 2. What are other schools using to monitor the quality of the wifi? I do not mean the rf interference quailty but instead a way to monitor of how well the access points are passing traffic, signal strength, average client SNR, etc? Thank you, -- Christina Christina Klam Network Administrator Institute for Advanced Study Email: ck...@ias.edu Einstein Drive Telephone: 609-734-8154 Princeton, NJ 08540 Fax: 609-951-4418 ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] WiFi Quality Monitoring
Www.7signal.com Caston Thomas InterWorks Sent from my iPhone 586.530.4981 mobile 248.608. office On Oct 19, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Christina Klam ck...@ias.edu wrote: Good Morning, We have noticed that after ~4 months the quality of our Cisco wireless network sours. We will get reports of poor wireless quality from users sitting directly under an access point. Often the WCS will report users on the access points with good dBm, but in reality the users can barely search the web. (I cannot remember if the average client SNR was looked at). The solution is to reboot the access point. So, we now are now talking about scheduling a reboot of all access points and controllers (4400s) every 3 months. While this may work to keep the problem at bay, it does not address two related questions. 1. Why is this happening? When I mentioned this behavior to a Cisco TAC, they said they had never heard of this before. As this has been our norm through multiple code and access point upgrades, I cannot believe this. 2. What are other schools using to monitor the quality of the wifi? I do not mean the rf interference quailty but instead a way to monitor of how well the access points are passing traffic, signal strength, average client SNR, etc? Thank you, -- Christina Christina Klam Network Administrator Institute for Advanced Study Email: ck...@ias.edu Einstein Drive Telephone: 609-734-8154 Princeton, NJ 08540 Fax: 609-951-4418 ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Cisco 7.3 Code and ISC DHCP
On 10/17/12 6:39 AM, Julian Y Koh wrote: On Oct 16, 2012, at 19:49 , Jason Murray jemur...@zweck.net wrote This is not completely related, but we just upgraded one of our Cisco routers, after the upgrade dhcp stopped working because one dhcp option was blank.'Debug IP dhcp server' was the only way we would have noticed this problem. The router was silently discarding the replies. Can you share router model and software versions? The last time we had this problem, I documented it here: http://blog.zweck.net/2012/10/cisco-fails-to-relay-dhcp-requests.html We have also seen this exact same problem on the Cisco 6509, although I don't remember the exact software versions. -- Jason E. Murray Sr. Systems Engineer Washington University in St. Louis Phone: 314-935-4865 Email: jemur...@wustl.edu Web: http://nss.wustl.edu/~jemurray/ ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] WiFi Quality Monitoring
We have a much much smaller wireless network than you all at 200 Cisco fat AP's controlled with Aruba's Airwave product, but I have been noticing in the last several months the same type of behavior with our AP's. I have traditionally rebooted the AP's twice a year to clear out the memory and or during a firmware upgrade. In the past year I did not reboot the AP's and have begun to receive complaints of poor connectivity and throughput. A reboot of the AP fixes the problem. I have not contacted Cisco about this problem yet. Mike Mike Hanson, CISSP Network Security Manager The College of St. Scholastica Duluth, MN 55811 On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Caston Thomas ctho...@iworkstech.comwrote: Www.7signal.com Caston Thomas InterWorks Sent from my iPhone 586.530.4981 mobile 248.608. office On Oct 19, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Christina Klam ck...@ias.edu wrote: Good Morning, We have noticed that after ~4 months the quality of our Cisco wireless network sours. We will get reports of poor wireless quality from users sitting directly under an access point. Often the WCS will report users on the access points with good dBm, but in reality the users can barely search the web. (I cannot remember if the average client SNR was looked at). The solution is to reboot the access point. So, we now are now talking about scheduling a reboot of all access points and controllers (4400s) every 3 months. While this may work to keep the problem at bay, it does not address two related questions. 1. Why is this happening? When I mentioned this behavior to a Cisco TAC, they said they had never heard of this before. As this has been our norm through multiple code and access point upgrades, I cannot believe this. 2. What are other schools using to monitor the quality of the wifi? I do not mean the rf interference quailty but instead a way to monitor of how well the access points are passing traffic, signal strength, average client SNR, etc? Thank you, -- Christina Christina Klam Network Administrator Institute for Advanced Study Email: ck...@ias.edu Einstein Drive Telephone: 609-734-8154 Princeton, NJ 08540 Fax: 609-951-4418 ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Off-net Rogue APs
I know there have been multiple discussions regarding how schools deal with rogue APs connected to the campus network. However we have run into a different situation and I was wondering how other campuses are dealing with this. We have students who are purchasing their own internet service to their room through the local cable company, then installing their own AP on this network. While this does not carry the normal concerns associated with rogue APs there is the concern about the wireless interference created. I am curious to know what policies/procedures others have used to deal with this situation. Thank you Bruce Entwistle Network Manager University of Redlands ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Radius start and stop session issue
Is anyone out there using Aruba with Radiator for wpa2 authentication back-end? We are seeing an issue for a while now, where within the same session, start IP record is different than stop IP record. Seems to happen mostly with Iphones and Android devices. Just curious to see if other schools are seeing this also. Below is one example from Radiator logs. I can also see this via Airwave logs, with one session having multiple IPs. Thanks. ATTRIBUTE = StartValue (StopValue) Acct-Session-Id = 87253245F0B47918B6FF-82212 (87253245F0B47918B6FF-82212) User-Name = 872532454 (872532454) Calling-Station-Id = F0B47918B6FF (F0B47918B6FF) Aruba-Location-Id = AP4-ks (AP4-ks) Timestamp = Fri Oct 19 09:47:42 2012 (Fri Oct 19 10:01:58 2012) Framed-IP-Address = 130.253.219.110 (130.253.219.125) Marcelo Marcelo Lew Wireless Enterprise Administrator University Technology Services University of Denver Desk: (303) 871-6523 Cell: (303) 669-4217 Fax: (303) 871-5900 Email: m...@du.edumailto:m...@du.edu [cid:image001.jpg@01CDAE10.3C9A3020] ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. inline: image001.jpg
