Sniff Wi-Fi

For some Wi-Fi professionals, WLAN Pi is the ultimate swiss army knife. For others, it is a byzantine puzzle.  Your humble blogger takes great pride in taking the complex and making it accessible. For the WLAN Pi, it starts with the Basics. The WLAN Pi project has been part of the WLAN professional community for several years. Conceived as a some-assembly-required kit project, the Pi has now grown beyond its humble roots. Your humble blogger has been fascinated by the WLAN Pi for some time, in large part because of the involvement of Jerry Olla. Jerry is a long time member of the WLAN community. He is based in Wisconsin, which makes me like him. He believes that the Milwaukee Brewers should not have received a publicly-funded baseball stadium, which makes me like him less. (I kid, I kid.) Jerry reached out to yours truly after a tweet expressing frustration at the WLAN Pi experience. Many Wi-Fi people have read, seen or been told about cool stuff that can be done with ...

There is a dirty little secret in the world of enterprise Wi-Fi: auto-channel selection doesn't work very well.  Every wireless LAN vendor has it.  Every wireless LAN vendor promotes it.  But when the Wi-Fi gets busy or crowded of full of mobile devices, auto channels will leave users frustrated and admins confused.   What to do about enterprise auto-channel?  Why, fix it, of course.  Here are some tips for getting it fixed the right way. First, the positive side of auto-channel: it saves you time.  Auto-channel selection is one of the two primary parts of auto-RF protocols that are supported by enterprise controllers, APs and management systems.  (The other part is auto-transmit power.)  Auto-RF protocols automatically adjust channel numbers and transmit power levels on APs.  Auto-RF protocols use information received by a large number of APs to decide when to adjust.  What that means is that if an AP senses a microwave oven b...