Can your WiFi do this?
AKA Altiwi week #21 summary.
Last week was again devoted to fixing bugs but during the process we crafted quite nice feature, I’d like to share with you. If you are a network administrator, you’ve probably went into following or similar situation: You are trying to debug some weird issue, in the ideal case somewhere remote, and you are almost certain, that the device you are configuring is doing well. Despite of that, the system as a whole does exactly what comes to its mind :-)
In such cases, usually the last resort is some kind of trace dump, usually performed by tcpdump tool or by Wireshark. Or by combination of the two. The setup for doing the trace dump is often quite cumbersome, if you want to dump the traffic coming from your access point, for example, you often do not have the possibility to trace directly the device, so you have to make some kind of indirect operation like setting port mirroring on the switch, or setting up special software on the client device.
That said— the tcp dump is often kept as a last resort, even though the value of the dump itself might be immense and can save a lot of your time on the long run. But the preparations…
So, we decided to simplify such endeavours. Right now, if you are using the latest firmware (0.0.67 as of time of writing) you can easily generate the trace in the form of PCAP file directly from the web console just with three clicks.
Click on the access point you want to trace, then click on the Debug button and last click the Get tcpdump and you are done. Capture the traffic you want and then just download the generated file to your computer and analyze it with Wireshark or other similar tool.
I have created short demo, just to see, how easy it can be!
Debugging the underlying issue and building this tool took quite a time, so this is the only (though significant) improvement of the Altiwi cloud managed platform this week.
This is part of our efforts to give the network administrators the same or maybe even better level of insight on what’s going on in their network, as we believe, that the visibility is the key for successfull operations.
Right now, I am going to play with the just arrived hardware samples to build a firmware for it.
Stay tuned :-)
