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Converting Images For Survey and Management Tools

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Being able to convert electronic floor plans into formats supported by a wireless survey or management tool is a regular part of being a WiFi professional. A customer may often provide floor plans in a format that isn’t accepted by the particular tool that you are using, leaving you with a file-conversion headache. In this article we take a look at a solution (for Windows users) to convert two common file types into a useable format. Background When using a professional wireless survey tool, one of the first steps in preparing your survey project is to import an electronic copy of the building floor plans. The plans are used to show areas surveyed and the RF measurements (“heapmaps”) that have been taken. Similarly, once a WiFi network has been installed, there is often a requirement to import floor plans into a network management system (NMS) to show the areas covered by the new deployment. This may be a cloud-based console or perhaps a dedicated on-site management server

Calibrating a Wireless LAN Survey Plan

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One of the most important steps in completing a WiFi network survey using  a professional survey tool is to ensure that you have a correctly calibrated the floor plans used to conduct the survey. Without this step, your survey may be inaccurate or, at worst, worthless. In this article we look at why this is important, together with the right (and wrong) way to do it. Background When performing any type of  WiFi network survey using a tool such as Ekahau’s Site Survey or Fluke’s AirMagnet, one of the first tasks performed is the creation of a survey project. During the creation of the survey project, a number of configuration tasks must be performed. One of mandatory tasks is to import an electronic copy of the floor plan of the area to be surveyed. The floor plan is generally an image file (jpg, png, bmp etc.format) that has been created from an architect’s blueprint of each floor of a building. Professional survey tools also often allow the import of AutoCad (DWG) f

Cisco WLC: Per-client Packet Capture

Sometimes, you just want to capture the packets associated with a particular wireless client and see what the heck is going on with that client. Often, it may not be practical to do an over-the-air packet capture, as perhaps the client is at a remote location or just just don't have access to a wireless capture card. I recently had an issue trying to understand why an Android device that I was trying to 'on-board' using Cisco's ISE wouldn't access the Google Play store. I desperately wanted to capture the over-the-air frames from the client to have a look at what the client was doing. After a quick 'Google' around, I found an intriguing set of Cisco WLC CLI commands that allow a packet capture of traffic for a wireless client. This can all be done without having to change the AP mode, or reboot the AP etc. In summary, the feature allows packets to be captured for a specified wireless client that is sending/receiving traffic to/from an AP. T