One of my favorite parts of working in AirWave customer support is getting to see AMP provide value to our customers in unexpected ways.  Take an email I recently got from one of my favorite customers (he’s a network admin at a university in the Midwest): he noticed one of his APs in a situation that he called “stuck” – it was showing as down in AMP.  However, when he asked his help desk to investigate they used a couple of other network monitoring tools (which will remain nameless) that were able to ping it, and they thought that all was well. 

 He wrote in asking me to figure out why AMP thought the AP was down, with the assumption that it was in fact up, and there was a problem in AMP.  He opened a remote connection for me and I logged in to his AMP, where I noticed that the error message for the AP stated that the device was missing radio cards.  This gave me my first clue:  even if a device is on the network (and pingable), AMP doesn’t consider an absence of radio cards to be a valid state.

 My next step was to take AMP out of the picture all together.  I did an SNMP walk of the command line to check what the device was reporting about its radios:

 # sw <customer IP address> <customer community string> ifDescr

 which returned data that lacked any information about dot11 radios. 

 I then did the same walk for a device that AMP was reporting as up.  The same walk returned data about dot11 radios.

 I wrote back and presented him with my findings, and within an hour or so I got a response – both radio interfaces had in fact disappeared, and he was having the AP replaced immediately.  He also thanked me for help with what turned out to be a rather unusual problem.   

 I think this is a good example of the type of support we strive to provide at AirWave: willing to dig in to a problem and troubleshoot beyond the boundaries of AMP.   And we love unusual problems!