DFS or Dynamic Frequency Selection is part of IEEE 802.11h amendment. DFS is used by Cisco WLC controllers to detect the presence of radars and cause the lightweight access points to select a different channel to avoid interference. Continue reading

Below is one of my favourite photos taken at Juniper Networks during Wireless Field Day 4 in San Jose. Left: Blake Krone, Chris Little, Scott Stapleton, Jennifer Huber, Samuel Clements, Lee Badman Right: George Stefanick, Keith Parsons, Mark Julier, Dan Cybulskie, Steve Williams, Peter Paul Engelen. The gentleman standing at the far end is Bruce Alexander, author of 802.11 Wireless Network Site Surveying and Installation. Continue reading

In our last day in San Jose, Cisco's presentation covered several interesting topics, these include: 802.11ac timelines, the new Cisco 5760 IOS-based Wireless controller, a demo of the One Policy across the enterprise with ISE, an overview of Connected Mobile Experiences and Location Services Topology. IEEE Timeline for 80211.ac Cisco first started to talk about the current state of the IEEE 802.11ac specification. They provided the following timeline: CY2013 Q2 802.11ac WiFi Alliance Wave 1 CY2013 Q2 802.11ac module for Aironet 3600 CY2013 Q3 802.11ac mobile devices CY2014 Q1 WiFi Alliance Wave 2 CY2014 Q2 802.11ac client proliferation continues The... Continue reading

That Friday morning we were sitting in Cisco building-4 and attended Meraki's presentation. Everyone was expecting to get more details about what is going to happen to Meraki since it was acquired by Cisco. Will it survive as a brand? Will it merge with existing Cisco Unified Wireless products? Meraki Co-Founder and CEO, Sanjit Biswas, provided an update Cisco’s recent acquisition of his company. Mr. Biswas discussed Cisco’s plans for the Meraki product line as well as the future of the cloud-managed platform at Meraki and within Cisco and rumors of a tie-in with Cisco’s divestment of Linksys. Meraki has... Continue reading

February 14, 2013 marks Aruba’s anniversary, founded 11 years ago. Their primary goal was Innovation and today they consider IPv6 is another big trend. Aruba has been selling controller based WLANs for the past 11 years and started selling controller-less WLANs since 2-3 years. During our visit at Aruba Networks we were exposed to various hands-on lab sessions. These covered AirWave, controller-based and controller less WiFi. IEEE 802.11ac During our session, Aruba confirmed they are working on releasing 802.11ac capable APs. They also said they will also offer it in both 2.4 GHz & 5 GHz frequency bands. AirWave: Monitoring... Continue reading

During our meeting with Juniper, they shared their plans about increasing their level of investment in the WiFi space. Here is a few new things Juniper will do to help them execute their vision: the new AP 532E with external antennas a new wireless controller, the WLC100, supports 32 APs, 800 clients, replaces WLC2 and WLC8. It is "fan less" (that explains why it is so heavy), AT powered A virtual wireless controller that supports everything a real controller does, no missing features. the initial release will support 256 APs, over 6000 clients runs on VMWare ESXi Smartpass Connect: addresses... Continue reading

My previous work experience with Motorola is limited to troubleshooting problems with their WiFi bar code scanning hand-held devices. Today I learned more about their new architecture and the value it can bring to your organization. First, let's start on how Motorola's introduces themselves: they are an RF one stop shop, they offer multiple solutions, making Motorola the strategic choice. They were one of the first companies offering VoIP on WiFi and have a long history of innovation in wireless. They focus on solving customer problems and are present in Service Provider, transport, manufacturing, government, healthcare, hospitality, education and retail.... Continue reading

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Wireless Tech Field Day fourth edition, held in San Jose CA. This event is spread over three days and I encourage everyone of you to attend it live from the comfort of your location. You will learn a lot from this unique event. Motorola is the first presenting sponsor. This is followed by a presentation from Keith Parsons about his WiFi stress tests project and experiences. You can download Keith's test results report for free. Here is the agenda for this exciting program: Wednesday, Feb 13 14:00-16:00 Motorola Solutions Presents at Wireless Field Day 4... Continue reading

Do you use the same web apps over and over? A typical sequence would be: launch your favourite web browser, type in the URL or even faster, you bookmarked the URL and just click that button to launch the app in a new tab. When you kill your browser, you have to go over that process again. Enter Fluid Here is a tip I am sharing with you. Fluid is a free application that lets you create a Real Mac App (or "Fluid App") out of any website or web application, effectively turning your favorite web apps into OS X... Continue reading

By the title of this post, you may wonder if I like wine. Yes I do and I've been a wine collector for years. But today I would like to share with you how an event like the Wireless Field Day (WFD) is important to me. First, I've never seen something similar in the industry. Wireless FIeld Day WFD focuses on wireless and mobility technologies, including Wi-Fi and mobile device management. Second, WFD brings together the best independent thought leaders in wireless to discuss pressing issues and technology advancements with key companies in the space. Two years ago, I had... Continue reading

What are some of the emerging technologies organizations should pay attention to and consider leveraging in 2013? Three of these key emerging technologies are: Cloud Architectures the Mobile Enterprise the shift from Wired to Wireless Networking. Cloud Architectures Infrastructure continues to build out the hybrid cloud. Facts continue to show that Infrastructure is in the midst of a major shift towards cloud architectures, both “private” and “public”. in fact, analysis from mid-2012 indicates that nearly half of all application and web hosting capacity will be on cloud-based architectures by 2015. Organizations already started moving several aspects of IT to the... Continue reading

When comes time to figure out how to physically install a Cisco Access Point, you may ask yourself how. This may vary depending on the access point in use. Hopefully, Cisco published a web page with collection of documents about product mounting hardware. Product installation guides are available for the following access points: 1040 Series Access Points 1130 Series Access Points 1140 Series Access Points 1260 Series Access Points 1600 Series Access Points (Coming soon) 2600 Series Access Points 3500 Series Access Points 3600 Series Access Points On that same web page, you will also find a guide about Indoor... Continue reading

Ever since I acquired my Samsung Galaxy S3 phone, I installed several apps and I am sharing that with you today. Some are free, some are not. Which apps do you use? 7digital (purchase music) Amazon Kindle (read your favourite ebooks) Android VNC (virtual network computing) AVG Antivirus free ArchiDroid (zip and unzip files) Astro File Manager (the best) BarCode Scanner (required for SAQ.com app) Battery Widget Reborn (get stats on your battery) Beter Battery Stats (get stats on your battery) Calengoo (multi gmail account calendar) Call Log Calendar (writes an entry in your calendar for each call & sms)... Continue reading

Cisco Prime Infrastructure release 1.2 now offers several components found in Cisco LMS (LAN Management Solution). Combining the wireless functionality of Cisco Prime Network Control System (NCS) with the wired functionality of Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution (LMS), Cisco Prime Infrastructure simplifies and automates many of the day-to-day tasks associated with maintaining and managing the end-to-end network infrastructure from a single pane of glass. The new converged solution delivers all of the existing wireless capabilities for RF management, user access visibility, reporting, and troubleshooting along with wired lifecycle functions such as discovery, inventory, configuration and image management, automated deployment, compliance... Continue reading

For many years, Wireshark has been used to capture and decode data packets on wired networks. Wireshark can also capture IEEE 802.11 wireless traffic while running on a variety of operating systems. I recently wrote an article for Hakin9 Magazine that describes how Wireshark is used to capture / decode 802.11 traffic and its configuration specifics based on the operating system you are running. It covers three popular OS: MS-Windows, Linux and OS X. It also covers two ways to indirectly collect 802.11 traffic and then analyze it with Wireshark. Hakin9 magazine is available by subscription only and this month... Continue reading

When using Microsoft Windows RADIUS service to authenticate your user logins, you have to configure each RADIUS client in your Windows server with a shared secret. A RADIUS client can be a device such as a router, LAN switch, or WiFi Access Point / Controller that authenticates users. Depending on your security policies, you may either have unique shared secrets (1 per RADIUS client) or the same shared secret for all your RADIUS client base. In the latter, you can use a shortcut in Microsoft IAS / NPS to minimize configuration time. All you have to do is to specify... Continue reading

Besides Buffalo AirStation, two other vendors introduced 802.11ac consumer products. Netgear announced its R6300 router whereas Cisco will soon offer their new Linksys EA6500. You can find more info at the links below. NETGEAR R6300 WiFi Router-802.11ac Dual Band Gigabit Full Review - Another 802.11ac product is reviewed here. Conclusion: the reviewer favors the Netgear over the Buffalo unit. Cisco 802.11ac Router with Cloud Control - Cisco announced its forthcoming Linksys EA6500 router with 801.11ac (gigabit) wireless Continue reading

Here is some recaps of the week: Tablets Microsoft announces new 10.6″ Microsoft Surface tablets, running Windows 8 in RT and ‘Pro’ flavours - They call it Surface Site Surveying with the Motion Computing F5v Tablet - WLAN Pro Jennifer Huber shares experience with the F5v Tablet Certifications Passing The CWSP (Certified Wireless Security Professional) - WLAN Pro George Stefanick shares his experience passing the CWSP exam The First Combined Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure Magic Quadrant: Aerohive Networks Positioned as a “Visionary” in the First Combined Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure Magic Quadrant - Aerohive Networks as... Continue reading

In OS X, you can tag files using various tools such as Hazel, Default Folder X, Tags, DevonThink and others. The process of tagging consists into attaching keywords to your files so they can be retrieved easily later. Today I will discuss how I use Hazel and its embedded scripting capabilities to automatically apply tags to files. First, Hazel is a commercial tool that you configure to watch specific folders on your MAC and then take actions. For instance, you can have Hazel to monitor the Downloads folder and then move files to specific vendor folders, e.g., Cisco folder, Fluke... Continue reading

As a solo practionner, I often have to prepare project plans that outline tasks, their duration, dependencies, etc. I later use these in presentations for my customers and as a basis for discussion. As I rely more and more on my iPad to do my work, I started looking for project management apps. I found inShort, a quite amazing piece of software. It provides everything I need: - block diagrams that depict the overall project outline - drill-down on specific tasks - WBS (work breakdown structure) reports - Gantt charts Below is a block diagram showing the overall project at... Continue reading

Whenever I perform a WiFi site survey, I always take a photo of the AP as a reference and for later reporting. Below is an AP at 18' above the ground. As I perform this step for each survey location within a building or warehouse, I need to keep track of the AP name. For this purpose, I use Snap, an iPhone camera app that enables annotations on photos. Snap will clone the original photo and use it to store your annotations. The following AP8 is an example of annotation. You can find Snap on Apple app store at this... Continue reading

Recently I was troubleshooting a WiFi roaming problem at a customer site. At some point I was suspecting an application timeout. In order to verify this on the WiFi side, I had to decrypt the 802.11 WEP packets. WireShark in combination with AirPcap can achieve this for you. It is quite easy to setup. First, I used three AirPcap WiFi adapters to capture traffic on channels 1, 6 and 11. See picture below. Next, from the AirPcap control panel I provided the WEP key for a specific SSID as follows: Then, I launched WireShark and from the Wireless toolbar, I... Continue reading

For a couple of years, I have been using Portable Ubuntu. This enables running Ubuntu Linux under Microsoft Windows. Thanks to Claudio Sanchez (@demonccc) who ported Ubuntu to CoLinux which is Windows based. I use it on several lab machines to perform testing. It is also portable as you can copy it onto a USB key and carry it with you and execute it from any Windows machine. Ideally, you would get a USB dongle of 8GB or more. It is very easy to install. First, download Version_4 from the Portable Ubuntu Remix at Sourceforge.net. For example, file: Portable_Ubuntu_V4_slimLZM2_091311.exe Then... Continue reading