Posts

ISE's Evil Default

Image
Whilst working with Cisco ISE recently, I became aware of a setting within the product that could be a major ‘gotcha’ if you aren’t aware of it. We’ll take a very quick look at it in this article. Background Tucked away in the depths of the Cisco ISE menu structure is a rather innocent-looking configuration setting under the ‘Anomalous Client Detection’ section of the System Settings. The option I’m referring to can be found in the following location in ISE 1.2: Administration > System> Settings > Protocols > RADIUS The screenshot below shows the settings page I am discussing: The settings on this page have been provided to protect ISE in the face of an onslaught of misbehaving or mis-configured clients that may flood it with authentication traffic (and hence RADIUS traffic). In larger environments, this could become an issue and affect ISE’s performance. Suppress Anomalous Clients The tick-box ‘Suppress Anomalous Clients’ provides a very

Converting Images For Survey and Management Tools

Image
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

Image
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