Wifi

Meraki Auto RF Explained

Meraki loves to chalk up the secret sauce in their products to "Meraki Magic" and boasts “anyone can do it”. Yet our inner engineering geek wants to open the curtain and see the real show. An example of that is Auto RF, which is a form of Radio Resource Management (RRM) that allows Meraki Wi-Fi… Continue reading Meraki Auto RF Explained

Wifi

Designing Wi-Fi for High Density

In technical interviews, I often ask (and am often asked): How would you design a Wi-Fi network to support a large room with 1000 devices? The question is purposely vague to identify how someone thinks through a problem that doesn't have a single answer, and to observe how thoroughly they respond. Below I'll take my… Continue reading Designing Wi-Fi for High Density

Wifi, Wireshark

Multicast over Wireless

Multicast has brought a lot of efficiencies to IP networks. But multicast wasn’t designed for wireless, and especially isn’t well suited for high-bandwidth multicast applications like video. I'll cover the challenges of multicast over wireless and design considerations. But first, an overview of multicast: To level set, I'll briefly cover IP multicast. For the purposes… Continue reading Multicast over Wireless

Wifi

Deploying Wi-Fi for Location Analytics

Many Wi-Fi vendors on the market now include the capability to leverage access points for location analytics in addition to serving clients. However, deploying location analytics has its own set of requirements, and attempting to simply leverage the same APs for location analytics may have suboptimal results if not planned out correctly. The following sections… Continue reading Deploying Wi-Fi for Location Analytics

General, Mac, Tools, Wifi, Windows

Wifi and Meraki Widgets for Mac and Windows

I recently decided to try to learn how to write python a little bit. I'm still not very good at it, however I did create something recently that I feel should be shared! Meraki local status pages can provide some very useful information for troubleshooting, however having to browse to ap.meraki.com/switch.meraki.com/wired.meraki.com is not always desirable,… Continue reading Wifi and Meraki Widgets for Mac and Windows

Cisco ISE, Radius, Wifi

Deconstructing the RADIUS CoA process

If you need to brush up on the RADIUS process, please read my previous post: Following the 802.1X AAA process with Packet Captures Everyone talks about it, yet I rarely meet folks that really understand what CoA (Change of Authorization) means for RADIUS authentication and client access. I recently spent a few hours troubleshooting RADIUS… Continue reading Deconstructing the RADIUS CoA process

Wifi, Wireshark

Using editcap to prune a packet capture

This is just a quick one. I recently needed to filter out a couple packet captures of unneeded frames/packets for some training material. I had unfortunately captured a crap ton of data though and really didn't want to post the whole 20M pcap file. I ran across the wireshark function called "editcap". There is a… Continue reading Using editcap to prune a packet capture

Cisco ISE, Radius, Wifi

Following the 802.1X AAA process with Packet Captures

EDIT: After chatting with David Westcott (@davidwestcott) I have made a few additions to this post. He has graciously asked that I add a little more details including the packet captures so everyone can follow along. This was a great idea, so please enjoy! 802.1X is typically the first step in one of the more… Continue reading Following the 802.1X AAA process with Packet Captures

Cisco ISE, Meraki, Wifi

Single SSID BYOD Onboarding

**This video builds on top of the previous video of BYOD with Device Registration and Native Supplicant Provisioning. So please be sure to watch it for configuring the certificate templates and some of the SSID configuration. ** In this video we configure ISE and wireless with a single SSID for WPA2-Enterprise to perform device registration and… Continue reading Single SSID BYOD Onboarding