AirWave Podcast with CSU San Marcos [15:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As some of you may have heard, the California State University System announced back in September that all 23 schools will eventually be moving off of Cisco WLAN gear and onto Aruba Networks products. AirWave is currently being used to manage and monitor wireless networks at 7 of the CSU campuses including CSU San Marcos.

In this episode of AirWaves I spoke with John Humes who is the Network Manager at CSU San Marcos and was on the evaluation committee that selected Aruba as the standard for the CSU system moving forward.

Like many of the CSU schools, San Marco is currently using Cisco for their WLAN infrastructure and John discusses the issues he faces on a daily basis and how a tool like AirWave makes his life easier.

John also describes the migration path and how AirWave’s multi-vendor capabilities will play a strategic role in their network moving forward.

Lately, I’ve had a lot of people using the Airwave Management Platform (AMP) ask about how to integrate AMP with existing customer portals.

Luckily, the AMP server contains an XML API that allows customers to access all sorts of information that they are used to seeing in the AMP GUI. All of these API’s are documented on the Home -> Documentation page.

One use case for using the XML API is to look up clients by MAC address on the wireless network using a third party application. The API call looks like this:
https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/client_search.xml?query=4b:5c

In this case, we want to know about all users that have ‘4b:5c’ in their MAC address. The output includes (among other items), the full MAC address of the client, username, DNS name of the device, and VLAN id. This data can be used for all sorts of purposes in custom portals and external applications.

Another way to access data is to ‘scrape’ screens directly from the Airwave GUI. For those of you who have AMP installed today, you’ve probably noticed that in the URL, there are a lot of pages that end with ‘?id=xxxx’. An example of this would be the AP Monitoring page. Normally, the URL for that page looks like the following:
https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ap_monitoring?id=12810.

This URL will get the AP page with all the navigation tools bar and AMP status information at the top of the page. But, what if you just want the AP information to insert into another portal page? By inserting a ‘/nf/’ into the URL, we can access just the AP monitoring data. Using the same URL example above, we end up with this URL:
https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/nf/ap_monitoring?id=12810.

These are only two simple examples, but the reality is that with just a little bit of creativity, you can really unleash the power of AMP in to your custom applications.

I was going through some of my webinar questions the other day, and someone was asking if I was still a Ham Radio operator. Well, the answer is yes and my call sign is KB5EWE (extra class).

Another question that was asked revolved around the fact that the 802.11 spectrum is shared RF space and could that cause problems once everyone is using the limited amount of spectrum. Well, this is certainly an issue, but with the low power output and some of the advanced algorithms that the latest generation of AP use, it’s much less of a problem than one might think. That is, until you take the case of someone like a Ham Radio operator who can use much more transmit power and much higher antenna gain on channels 1-6 than someone who is not licensed by the FCC (Part 15 vs. Part 97).

One of the reasons that Ham Radio operators like the VHF and UHF bands (where 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz reside) is the fact that these signals can pass through the ionosphere right into outer space. Some operators will ‘bounce’ signals off the moon to get around the line of sight issues and talk to someone on the other side of the globe. I’ve even used my 144Mhz (2 meter band) radio to talk to an astronaut on the space shuttle as it circled the earth. For more information on Ham Radio, a good resource is the American Radio Relay League (www.arrl.org).

Last week I spent some time doing half-day AirWave training road shows. Most of the folks in my classes were from small to medium size companies and the types of questions that I received really hit home that there is still a lot of wireless training that needs to be done to bring everyone up to speed.

For example:

• Why in the U.S. do we typically only use channels 1,6, and 11?
• Should all of my APs at a single site have the same SSID’s?
• What does RSSI and dbm mean when talking about wireless signals?

These are basic questions that all wireless administrators should understand.

There are several courses out in the market place today that try to address the basics of wireless networking. I would recommend some of the CWNP classes (www.cwnp.com). These courses are great for people who already understand some of the basic network concepts, but want to elevate their wireless knowledge level and increase their marketability to employers.

This morning, we announced that AirWave has agreed to merge with Aruba Networks. We expect this to be great news for our customers. Our mission remains absolutely unchanged: to develop the premier multi-vendor management software that allows our customers to operate and support their wireless networks.

Aruba is fully committed to operating AirWave as a business unit focused on developing and providing multi-vendor management software. The AirWave software will simply get better, because we’re going to have the resources of a larger organization behind us – and we expect this will enable us to add support for even more hardware vendors. Supporting the leading hardware vendors that our customers choose is critical to everything we do.

We believe in open, standards-based technology – and in giving every customer the freedom to choose the products that best meet their specific requirements. Aruba believes exactly the same thing… and that’s why this combination makes so much sense to us.

I’ve spoken with and emailed a number of AirWave customers this morning and have been very touched that many so people’s first questions have been, “What does this mean for AirWave employees? Is everyone going to be OK?”. First… I want to thank everyone for their concern for the people they’ve built relationships with over the past several years. I also want to reassure everyone that this transaction is a very good thing for the people of AirWave – AirWave’s employees are being kept together as a team and will operate as business unit. This will provide us the additional resources we need to develop even more interesting applications in the future.

From a customer perspective, nothing changes. You should call the same support number, talk to the same people, log into the same user forum… We’re here to help, and if you have any questions, just give us a call.