It’s been too long since I posted and it’s been far too long since I posted about a wireless topic. So no better time to start than now. I have been working with an Aruba Central/Instant AP wireless deployment and ran into a somewhat unique situation where we wanted to not broadcast our standard set of SSIDs to a location and instead broadcast a single SSID. In addition to this, we had some areas on campus where we were already broadcasting an additional SSID and we didn’t want to break this. At the time of writing, I am running Instant […]

It’s been quite a while since I posted an update to the blog, so I figured I better get on it. To ease into it, I am starting with a recently completed topic, segmenting my home network and lab into multiple VLANs. As of the time of writing, I performed this on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X running firmware Firmware v2.0.9-hotfix.6. I have been acquiring more smart home devices and figured it was time to start segmenting these off my network. To do this, I thought it would be easiest to create an “internet only” VLAN on which I could put […]

It’s been long overdue since I published a new post. Recently, I changed jobs and now manage an Aruba deployment, while this has been different, I am excited about this challenge. I wanted to share about one of the latest problems I ran into and what I learned from it. I have a set of switches that were not syncing properly with Aruba Central. While working with TAC, and not being able to find what was wrong, they recommended that I upgrade the firmware on these switches as one of the first steps in the troubleshooting process.  Since this is […]

With more and more Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Devices showing up in my house, I figured it would be a good idea to build a separate network for these devices to live on, rather than on my regular network. Creating the actual network was the easy part, but figuring out the ACLs to block this traffic was a little more difficult. I wanted to share my experiences in case anyone else is looking to do this same thing. My Setup At the current time of writing this post, my home network is fairly simple: Ubiquiti Edge Router A […]

After listening to a podcast by the Clear to Send folks about Spectrum Analysis. I had some recollections about some recent conversations that I had with few people about Bluetooth devices and determining if WiFi will stop these devices from working. Let me provide you some background on this situation. Recently, I was informed about an upcoming event and the person in charge of this event wanted me to make some modifications to the WiFi we had deployed at the location. Usually, this is a custom SSID for them, but this time they wanted me to disable the WiFi at […]

Reading has never been one of my strengths. This is mainly due to the fact that it’s hard for me to stay focused while reading. I tend to daydream and by the time I have noticed, I am usually a few pages in with no idea where I started daydreaming or what was covered during this time. Knowing that this is something that I wanted to improve, but not exactly sure how I could accomplish it, I began researching some solutions. The one that made the most sense to me was listening to audiobooks, so far I have found this […]

In one of my conversations with another wireless engineer, I was made aware of a feature in Wireshark that can be used to visually display a packet and the individual fields within it. I recall hearing about this feature a little while ago but thought it was only available in the beta versions of Wireshark. It looks like this has now been rolled into the stable release of Wireshark. After struggling for a little bit to find an exact name or how to turn it on, I figured I should write a blog post about it in case anyone else […]

As a follow-up to one of the previous articles that I had created. I wanted to have a backup of this data, and also be able to access it from more than just my computer. My solution to this problem is to put this data in Google Sheets since this allows me to achieve both of my goals. Also, I know that not everyone uses Excel so why not. While it is not as easy in Excel. It’s still different enough that I decided to put together another blog post documenting the steps. Starting highlight the row, column, or data […]

In my current job role, I sometimes need to use Point to Point (PtP) Wireless links to reach some other areas that were previously unreachable. The links are mostly basic and I haven’t yet done anything too crazy relating to this subject such as detachable antennas, really long distances, or licensed frequencies, but maybe one day I will get these experiences. This is not usually my first choice but this is what I turn to when I need a reasonably inexpensive solution for connectivity. From a different conversation, Keith Parsons shared with us a great piece of information relating to […]

Recently, I purchased a WiFiStand Wheeled Basic Kit from WIFIStand (https://wifistand.com/) after getting all the parts and putting it together everything looked great and very sturdy. After using it a few times I noticed that the WIFIStand would extend out to 8 1/2 feet to the t-bar, and the ceilings I was testing this on were 11′. I wanted to try and make these APoS surveys as accurate as possible so I set out to find a solution. I didn’t want to buy a new tripod since I wasn’t sure if the wheel kit I had purchased would fit a […]