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In Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is the regulatory body responsible for managing the radiofrequency spectrum, ensuring that it is used efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of various sectors including telecommunications, broadcasting, radiocommunications, and online services. The ACMA’s role includes planning, allocating, and licensing spectrum resources, as well as enforcing compliance with regulations to minimize interference between different services and technologies. Unlike other countries when it comes to Wi-Fi, and specifically 6GHz, we have been hampered with limited spectrum availability, thus limiting the channels available for use. Currently, Wi-Fi (or RLAN as it’s referred to by ACMA) is limited to the lower 6GHz band. The full 6GHz spectrum is hotly contested space, being shared with Earth-to-Satellite services and TV Outside Broadcasts, as well as being wanted by other services like 5G. ...

Having been to, I think, 10 now Cisco Live events, this year was a bit different as I was presenting. One thing as an attendee that you don’t get is an appreciation for how much time and effort goes into a 90-minute presentation. For me, it was about 1 hour of prep per minute of presentation in the lead-up to the event. I know for some others they spent even more time again. My session covered Automating the deployment of wireless networks (9800 WLC’s) using Catalyst Center (formerly DNA-C). If you’d like to watch the replay or review the deck, you can find it all here. ...

Aside from the Proactive PCAP feature, this would have to be the best addition to the Meraki dashboard in recent times. Not only can we view a PCAP that’s been taken, but we can also get some auto analysis (Meraki Assurance) on what the potential problem may be. This is handy for the seasoned Wi-Fi professional, but even more valuable for an inexperienced engineer as not only can it guide them to the issue, they can also learn from the problems at the same time. Landing on the analysis screen, we are given an overview of the problem with the option to expand out the relevant sections for more detail. We can also view the PCAP in a Wireshark-like view straight from the dashboard as well, so this saves the hassle of downloading and opening the file for just a quick look. Given that the analysis has already been done, we are given a pretty good guide that in this instance we had a problem with DHCP offers not being received by the client. This gives us a quick answer, but sometimes we might still want to dig into what went on and actually investigate the flow of frames. For this, we can expand out the packet capture to view the frames just as we would in Wireshark. I’ve selected a bit more interesting capture for this exercise. From here we are presented with a default view or profile, which is okay, but not great. So down the bottom right-hand corner of the panel, we can adjust the profile depending on the scenario of the capture. Selecting the OTAWireless profile, we are shown the more relevant columns, and like most wireless engineers prefer, we get color-coded Frame Types. Just like in Wireshark, we can then create display filters. For a proactive PCAP this might not be as useful, but for a manual capture that you’ve then selected to store in the cloud, this is of more use. If we are investigating issues with retries for example, then we can use the following to filter all of the frames that are being retransmitted. ...

The Proactive Packet Capture is a tool that I’ve used for a long time now in Catalyst Center (formerly DNA-C), so it’s exciting that it’s now been introduced to the Meraki side of the world as well. With over 100 event triggers that can occur during the client onboarding process or normal operations, there is a fair chance that whatever issue a client is experiencing in the network will be captured automatically. The Proactive PCAP does require MR31 or higher, and the APs need to be Wifi 6/6E or 7 to support the feature. The retention time for proactive captures is 7 days, so when enabling the feature, you do need to decide if you want to enable it for some or all devices. You can select which APs you enable, which if you have a large/busy network would probably be the better way to go. Since I’m running this at home with only a couple of APs, I’m happy to turn it on for all devices. The other thing to note is that once this feature is GA, you will need an MR-ADV (Advanced) license to use the Proactive PCAP feature. This will be enforced in the future. As this is for my home, I had to leave it to run for a few days, and I came back to find plenty of captures. Most weren’t ones to worry about, as they were ones like EAPoL timeouts that happened as we were leaving the house, but there are certainly real-world examples of where this would be important. Looking down the right-hand side of the page, we can see which step of the onboarding process the trigger occurred at (Authentication, Association, DHCP, etc.), and we have the option to analyze the capture directly on the dashboard or download the PCAP to review in Wireshark on our local machine. These options are available regardless of if the capture was proactive or manually run. In the next post, we’ll have a look at the analysis view that we get on the dashboard. Again though, this is another instance where the smarts of the product can help save time and effort by capturing events before you even know that they’ve happened, and can save many hours trying to recreate problems or disrupting users even further to try and reproduce. ...

Packet captures have existed for a long time on the Meraki platform and have saved me great amounts of travel time over the years. But now they have had a refresh and not just a GUI makeover (okay, well it did get that as well), but new features added too. Proactive PCAP and cloud storage are the main stars here. The old view served us well and was clean, easy to use, and just did its job. Now called Intelligent Capture, it still does what the old feature did, but with a newer, fresher look, and now includes cloud storage (so no more losing files) and the newest feature, Proactive PCAPs, which we will have a look at in the next post and create a bit of a series rather than one long post. Nothing overly exciting in the Manual capture, but if we select to save to the cloud, then it will be retained for 90 days before being deleted. We can apply our capture filters here if we need to only capture specific frame types, certain mac or IP addresses or even certain traffic types. Examples are also provided to get you started. Really though I’ve only ever previously applied a capture filter for a specific mac address for the client I’m trying to troubleshoot, and then used display filters after to narrow down the specific information I want to see. Capturing as wide as possible (without getting too much unccessary data) and using a display filter after is always a much better solution I find, as then you don’t end up in the situation where you have to take multiple captures as you keep realising that you didn’t in fact capture all of the information that you need. ...