Magical Musings of WiFi

It has been over a decade since I've taken the CWNA.  I think a lot of the concepts are the same for anyone else who has also taken that.  I've been doing this for 10+ years and I didn't feel too much of a need to study and was able to pass this while only brushing up on some of the newer stuff like roaming and 802.11ac. The topic I got the lowest score in was for troubleshooting.  I can't get into details but the questions are very much a "it depends," and not black and white but whatever, I passed it. I also took the CWDP and passed that - If you've been in the WLAN field for more than 5 years and do designs on the regular, just go in and take it.  It was that easy BUT that is due to my experience.  I did decide to review some of the CWDP materials and I had most of 80% of it all in my head and just rounded the things out to make sure but you can also round/process of elimination those questions on the test in your head. The CWAP and CWSP ar...

I still think a lot of people don't realize how many companies and tech solutions providers are still living in 2012 when it comes to WLAN design.  There has been a lot to learn from over the last 5-7 years and one of those things is in the use of Ekahau vs Airmagnet.  At this point, we cannot excuse using Airmagnet in most any instance except for specific US government cases.  If a company is dictating use of AM and AM only, it's safe to assume they are not up to date nor do they make attempts to further their adoption of good WLAN practices. I pulled this data from Indeed and Linkedin job boards. The things we can mine about the WLAN field and the state of wireless via job advertisements is always interesting. On Indeed - jobs with Airmagnet vs Ekahau.  There are 70 WLAN jobs associated with Ekahau and there are 34 jobs using Airmagnet.  This is US based. Ekahau via Indeed US                 ...

What happens when you've done everything from the wifi side of diagnosis a problem dare I say a ghost problem? What if the situation within your network seems perfect, you can't find anything in packet captures, Prime or off your WLC - What other options do you have?  Luckily, I found plenty! One of the handiest tools I like to use when onsite and starting to check clients out is the NETSH command in command line. Doing a roaming analysis via the client versus on Prime isn't a bad thing some days to give you a real world perspective of when roams happen.  Of course, client debugging in WLCs help too but I figured I'd show you what I do when walking around with a laptop to see the BSSID you are connected to. I use  netsh wlan show interface  Which outputs this:     Name                   : Wi-Fi     Description            : Marvell ...

Ekahau Sidekick Accessory Testing by the WifiSpy I decided to test two products to augment my Surface Pro 4 running Ekahau 10 that will help prevent accidents from happening with the cable and allow free and easy movement as you survey.  Safety should be #1 if you do work in any production/warehousing/manufacturing facilities. The items tested today were Griffin Breaksafe Magnetic Breakaway USB Adapter, Standard USB Type a  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0759FKCK8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1  priced at 19.99 at the time of the writing. The other was this coiled USB to Micro-USB cable.   https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071D8VB2T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1   So first I will talk about the Griffin device.  Why would you want something like this?  If you've owned a MacBook in the past with the breakaway power cord, there isn't much more I can say ab...

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