Posts

A quick post today covering an issue that I’ve observed coming up a lot recently, which is catching engineers out, leading to deployment issues and poor user experience. The 9166 AP behaves a bit differently from other models in that when it’s operating in a country where 6GHz has not yet been approved, obviously the 6GHz radio can’t be enabled, but it’s the behavior of the radio that catches people out. From the 9166 datasheet: Note: In countries where the use of the 6GHz band is not allowed or authorized or if there is no current software support, the 6GHz radio will be disabled and will switch to 5GHz and operate as a dual 5GHz access point. The 6GHz radio may be enabled with future software, once the product is certified to operate at 6GHz for that country. ...

I’ve collected that set!!! The hardest of them all was left to last, after previously attempting the CWAP-402 exam a few years ago and falling one question short, I reset and started from scratch with my studies. Off the bat, I will say that the exam itself isn’t harder than any of the others in the P series. What is harder is the topics covered. Know the topics and then the exam is okay. BUT just because I passed the exam, I still feel like there is so much more to learn, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as learning should be constant, and no one knows everything. For context as well, this experience is based on the CWAP-404 exam, which is soon to be retired for the 405 exam, but I wouldn’t expect that too much would be changing as generally, it’s about a 105 difference from one to the next as old standards are removed and new ones added. I won’t go into what the CWAP exam is, as if you are here, then you probably already know… What I will say is that the first place you should start on your journey is the blueprint. Ignore the blueprint, and you probably won’t get far in passing. ...

Navigating the 6GHz Spectrum: Understanding Preferred Scan Channels (PSC) I feel like I’m late to the party with 6E, but in reality, not having 6GHz approved for use in Australia for so long has just meant that there is more real-world experience to learn from that others have already gone through when it comes to discovering 6E networks. With the introduction of the 6GHz band, Wi-Fi technology continues to evolve, offering faster speeds and reduced congestion. However, discovering 6GHz networks requires a new approach, and that’s where Preferred Scan Channels (PSC) come into play. This is actually the only method by which Wi-Fi 6E client devices are allowed to send probe requests when searching for 6GHz networks. ...

I’ve had WPA3 SAE transition mode configured for home now for a while, and whilst I wouldn’t use it in an enterprise deployment (too many bad drivers out there) it works (most of the time) for home and I’m not as concerned about PMF benefits. I would like to move to WPA3 SAE solely, but unfortunately there are still too many devices around the house that don’t support WPA3 and the overhead of running two SSID’s isn’t really worth it. My home production network is Meraki, with the lab being Catalyst, but today we’ll look at the Meraki deployment. Configuring the SSID for transition mode on the dashboard is straight forward. We select WPA3 Transition mode for the encryption type and make sure that 802.11w (PMF) is set to enabled. This means that clients that don’t support PMF and still only support WPA2 can still connect, but if the client supports PMF they can use it regardless of if they are connecting with WPA2 or WPA3. Within a few seconds the config is pushed to the AP and it’s now running in transition mode for this particular SSID. ...

The current long term 17.12 release of the IOS-XE 9800 WLC is feature packed, but tucked away in the release notes is a one liner that is sure to catch people out in the near future(or me the other day): From this release, the default console baud rate of the 802.11AX APs is changed from 9600 bps to 115200 bps. What does this mean? Well, digging a bit deeper, it only covers the Cat9k range of AP’s, so 9120, 9130,9136, 916x, etc AND It only impacts new (or factory reset) AP’s when they join the controller running 17.12 or higher. So if AP’s are already joined to the controller and are upgraded from 17.9.x to 17.12.x then they will still use the old 9600bps rate, but then if you add a new AP to the controller, that will use the new setting of 115200bps. If an upgraded AP is set back to factory default though and joins the controller again, it will assume the new 115200bps config. So you could/will end up with some AP’s on the old 9600bps config and some on the new 115200bps config. Or, once upgraded to 17.12 or higher then factory reset all AP’s from the CLI/GUI (not recomended unless you are bored and have a lot of time and a real reason to do this), and then you’ll have a standard across the board, no matter which AP you connect to (that’s a Cat9k AP anyway, Wave1/2 are not impacted by this!). WHY? Turns out the reasoning for this is simple, it’s so that the AP can boot faster! ...