[Cerowrt-devel] Recording RF management info _and_ associated traffic?

Outback Dingo outbackdingo at gmail.com
Sun Jan 25 03:07:18 EST 2015


my first initial and only thought is over stauration on your network, i
dont see anything of enterprise grade APs listed with 30+ users, how many
connections and how many users? are they all trying to download/move data
at the same time.

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Richard Smith <smithbone at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/22/2015 04:18 AM, David Lang wrote:
>
>  Recently, we picked up the 11th floor as well and moved many people up
>>> there. I got a 3rd AP (another TP-Link AC1750) and set that one up on
>>> a free channel with a different ESSID.
>>>
>>
>> I like to put all the APs on the same ESSID so that people can roam
>> between them. This requires that the APs act as bridges to a dedicated
>> common network, not as routers.
>>
>
> That's the ultimate plan but for convenience of being able to easily
> select what AP I'm talking to or to be able to tell folks to move from one
> to another I've got them on different ESSIDs.  It also helps me keep track
> of what RF channel things are on.
>
>  Then about a week before my original post I got notified that Internet
>>> was down.  Both 10th floor APs had stopped working.  The 11th floor
>>> (where I am) was still working.   On the 10th floor, I could connect
>>> to the  TP-link via its IP address on its wired interface but it did
>>> not seem to be passing wireless traffic. A reboot fixed it.
>>>
>>
>> There has been an ongoing bug with Apple devices on 5Ghz that causes the
>> wifi chipset to lockup. We think we've fixed it in the current Cerowrt,
>> but I don't know what kernel versions have this problem. This is likely
>> to affect multiple vendors who use the same chipset (check the openwrt
>> hardware list for details of the chipsets in each model)
>>
>
> Oooohhh!  That could be it. We have a _lot_ of Apple devices.  Most of the
> company uses MacBook,or Air and a large number of people have iPhones and
> we use iPods for some of our testing.   I'll go dig through the openWRT and
> get the details.
>
>  The WNDR3700 was completely unresponsive both via WiFi and when I
>>> tried its IP connected directly to it's switch with a Cat-5.  I also
>>> have a serial port mod on that wndr3700 so I connected up to that
>>> instead.
>>>
>>
>> hmm, it's not common to have it be unresponsive on the wired network.
>>
>
> It's uncommon to me. :)  This unit has travelled with me for years while I
> worked for OLPC and its see a lot of different wireless environments.
>  Granted never one with this many apple clients.  Usually 7-8 Linux/Windows
> machines and a pile of XOs.
>
> So this happened a lot at your SCALE setups?
>
>  room. All the stations are in about a 40 foot radius and all but 1 or
>>> 2 have line of sight to the AP.  The wndr3700 is in a closet on the
>>> side of the room with other equipment so it might be 80 feet away from
>>> the furthest station or so.
>>>
>>
>> this doesn't sound unreasonable unless your users are trying to use a
>> LOT of bandwidth (although the fact that you refer to the 50Mb
>> bottleneck indicates that you may be)
>>
>
> The bottleneck was just a nice side effect.  We don't use that much
> traffic.  I only noticed the limit once I started running netperf-wrapper
> tests from a wired host.
>
> Occasional there will be some big download that eats up bandwidth, but
> when I watch the throughput during the day we peak up in to the 40Mbps but
> the average is < 10Mbps (Download).
>
>  Can I perhaps approximate signal strength by looking at the bitrate
>>> for packets that station sends?  The theory being that higher quality
>>> RF links should use the higher bitrate encodings when sending.
>>>
>>
>> not reliably, too many other things factor in to that.
>>
>
> Indeed. Horst tells me I basically have 2 rates happening on the tplink
> 6Mbs and 24Mbps with a few 12Mbps in there.
>
>  If need be I can move the wndr to the same location as the tplink and
>>> then have stations connect to the wndr so I can watch the rx signal
>>> strength.
>>>
>>
> Looks like that's what I'll have to do.
>
>  There is a lot of room with consumer grade equipment from where you
>> currently are. The "Enterprise Grade" systems do have a lot of
>> infrastructure to coordinate the different APs.
>>
>
> Thanks for the ray of hope.  Yeah I don't need all the multi-AP
> coordination handoff stuff.
>
> --
> Richard A. Smith
>
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