Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

What’s going to happen to Nortel?

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It’s quite clear from the poll (included below) that the vast majority of Nortel customers were originally very content to take a “wait and see” approach to the bankruptcy filing. I created that poll on January 15, 2009. It’s now March 29, 2009 more than 90 days later and I get the impression that a lot of folks are really scratching their heads. I would almost be curious to see how many folks have changed their mind in the last 90+ days.

[poll id=”4″ type=”result”]

There are all sorts of rumors around the street these days… everything from a sale to a complete divestiture of the company and it’s assets. While it appears that it’s still business as usual at Nortel (product is readily available, new software releases are being released, support is still responsive) you have to wonder what’s going on and what the end game might look like.

I’ve personally had Brocade (Foundry), Cisco, HP, and Juniper in to discuss their enterprise product offers around LAN/WAN routing/switching.  We have quite a few small and large projects that are literally in limbo and I’m not sure how much more uncertainty we (I) as a customer can withstand. I’m curious to what people think today about Nortel?

[poll id=”5″]

I’m interested in hearing your comments and/or thoughts?

Cheers!

Issues with wireless roaming and Ralink chipsets?

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We recently needed to replace the USB based wireless adapter we use in our CoWs (cart on wheels). The legacy D-Link DWL-AG132 (802.11a/g) was no longer being manufactured and/or available from suppliers so we selected the D-Link DWL-160 (802.11n/a/b/g) and that’s were the fun started. We utilize HP Thin Clients on our carts and dwa-160have been pairing them with USB adapters for the past year and a half (saves on having to purchase the chassis expansion kit and the PCI card).

Our initial tests showed no problems in connecting to our Motorola RFS7000 with AP300 (802.11a/b/g) radios utilizing 802.1x (WPA/TKIP). A few weeks later though we learned we had a problem with the combination and we eventually discovered that the problems revolved around roaming. We noticed that the DWL-160 didn’t want to roam until it had lost complete signal to the AP it was associated to and then only after about 10 – 15 seconds would it roam to another APl. We had a really large project and the time frame was extremely tight so we decided to run out and pick-up a different adapter. So we purchased a Cisco Linksys wusb600n(WUSB600N) Wireless-N USB Network Adapter with Dual-Band. We decided to simplify our testing environment by removing the Windows XP Embedded (Thin Client) and test on a simple Windows XP SP2 laptop. We also removed the authentication (802.1x) and encryption (WPA/TKIP) and just test using an open network. We quickly noticed that the problem was not only evident at the 2.4Ghz frequency (802.11b/g) but also evident at the 5 Ghz frequency (802.11a). The big surprise came we noticed that the Linksys behaved exactly like the D-Link in that it would not roam which would lead to poor connectivity. We started to peel back the onion and almost immediately found that both products were based on the Ralink Technologies chipset (RT-2870).

We’ve performed multiple wireless packet traces using AirPCAP and WireShark and they don’t show any issues with the wireless access points, however, they do show a lack of probing and some odd behavior by the wireless adapters (STA).

We’re in contact with both Motorola and Ralink Technologies and we have tried Ralink’s reference drivers (1.4.1) along with a beta driver they have provided but we haven’t seen any real improvement. We did find that if you enable “Fast roaming”, which can be found the in the Advanced Properties of the RA utility the STA behaves much better but it’s still a world apart from the roaming performance that we’re accustom to.

Has anyone else seen any issues with either the D-Link DWL-160 or the Linksys WUSB600N in a corporate network with respect to roaming? I can’t imagine that we’re the first folks to stumble upon this issue given that Ralink Technologies chipsets are in all these products.

Cheers!

Motorola WS5100 and RFS7000 Software Update

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Motorola has released software v3.3.1 for the WS5100 and v1.3.1 for the RFS7000 Wireless LAN Switches. You can find the release notes for the 3.3.1 (WS5100) software release here. And you can find the release notes for the 1.3.1 (RFS7000) software release here. We’ve been running v1.3 on the RFS7000 for the past few months now with only a few small problems. We hope to start testing the Smart RF feature set that was released in the 1.3 Wi-NG software base very soon. We’re also eager to start testing the AP7131 802.11n Access Port in a few specific locations.

Here’s a quick excerpt from Motorola on v1.3.1 for the RFS7000;

RFS7000 v1.3.1 has the following feature focus: Voice, Security and Resiliency

Voice: Enhancements provide comprehensive WMM Admission control, enabling not only superior voice quality but also optimizations with respect to network usage for voice.

Security: Enhances the built-in IDS capabilities for Ad-Hoc Network Detection and .11n Rogue detection. Provides built-in IPS capabilities via Rogue AP containment for the wireless network.

Resiliency: SMART RF Management that enables the WLAN to automatically and intelligently adapt to changes in the RF environment to eliminate unforseen gaps in coverage.This technology provides dynamic network optimization to ensure user quality of experience at all times by automatic adjustments to channel and power (on detection of RF interference or loss of RF coverage/neighbor recovery).

All the above enable the wireless enterprise by making it easy to deploy, securely and with built-in resiliency and support for voice.
For the Adaptive AP:
• Adaptive AP7131 802.11 a/b/g/n Support ( v3.1.1 )
• Rogue AP detection
• Mesh statistics
• WLAN statistics
• Configurable IPS Sensor on the AP5131( D SKU) in Adaptive mode(ADP-5131 v2.2.1 image)
With the AP300:
• Dynamic Load balancing of AP300s after a primary reverts in a cluster
• Email Notification for critical alarms
• LDAP enhancements
• Cluster GUI for WLANS and APs visualization
• Securing Layer 3 AP and Wireless Switch protocol – Secure WiSPe
• MU Naming
System Enhancements:
• IP v6 Client Support

Cheers!

Motorola WS5100 and RFS7000 and Wi-NG v1.3

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Motorola has released software v3.3 for the WS5100 and v1.3 for the RFS7000 Wireless LAN Switches. This is v1.3 release of their Wi-NG software for Motorola’s Enterprise-class RF & Wireless Switches.

You can find the release notes for the 3.3 (WS5100) software release here. And you can find the release notes for the 1.3 (RFS7000) software release here.

I hope to provide some feedback in the coming weeks.

Cheers!

Motorola RFS 7000 Wireless LAN Switch

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We just recently started replacing our legacy Motorola (formerly Symbol) WS5000/WS5100 Wireless LAN Switches with the Motorola RFS 7000 RFS7000-1Wireless LAN Switch. I know quite a few organizations have jumped from Motorola over the past few years to Cisco, Aruba, Trapeze and Meru. While Motorola isn’t the easiest company to work with (who is these days) they really understand wireless and they have come through on a number of occasions involving highly technical problems. In short the product works and works well for our needs and fits in our budget. While Motorola may lack some of the bells and whistles of the other vendors mentioned above it’s stability is something we’ve come to enjoy.

The RFS7000 provides 4 10/100/1000 Cu/SFP Ethernet interfaces and can manage up to 256 802.11a/b/g Access Ports. We’ve long struggled managing some of our largest wireless environments where we needed 18 WS5000 switches (each WS5000 would only manage up to 48 802.11a/b/g Access Ports).The old WS5000 also required a one-to-one cold standby for redundancy and high-availability. The RFS7000 supports clustering and N+1 redundancy so we’re going to be using a lot less power and rack space not to mention all the configuration and cabling.

You can find the technical specifications for the RFS7000 here. And you can find the entire Motorola Wireless LAN portfolio here.

Let me provide a small example configuration. You’ll need to connect to the console interface (19200,8,N,1) and configure the Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The default username is “admin” while the default password is “superuser”.

RFS7000 release 1.2.0.0-040R
Login as 'cli' to access CLI.
sw-wireless.acme.org login: cli

User Access Verification

Username: admin
Password:
Welcome to CLI
RFS7000>enable
RFS7000#config term
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.

We’ll be using the interface ‘ge1’ as the Layer 2 (AP VLAN) interface and ‘ge2’ will be our Layer 3 interface. We’ll trunk ge2 and leave ge1 as access. We’ll also use VLANS 29-32 in order to bridge our WLANs to our Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 core. VLAN 23 will be our Layer 2 AP VLAN where the Access Ports will be connected.

RFS7000(config)#interface ge1
RFS7000(config-if )# switchport access vlan 23
RFS7000(config-if)# exit
RFS7000(config)# interface ge2
RFS7000(config-if)# switchport mode trunk
RFS7000(config-if)# switchport trunk native vlan 200
RFS7000(config-if)# switchport trunk native tagged
RFS7000(config-if)# switchport trunk allowed vlan none
RFS7000(config-if)# switchport trunk allowed vlan add 29-32,200

We’ll shutdown VLAN 1 just to be careful, we don’t want any loops.

RFS7000(config)# interface vlan1 no ip address
RFS7000(config)# interface vlan1
RFS7000(config-if)# shutdown

I use VLAN 200 as my management VLAN and place all my network electronics in that VLAN.

RFS7000(config)# interface vlan200
RFS7000(config-if)# management
RFS7000(config-if)# interface vlan200 ip address 10.1.1.40/24
RFS7000(config-if)# exit
RFS7000(config)# ip route 0.0.0.0/0 10.1.1.1

At this point the Motorola RFS7000 should be online and reachable via the network. Let’s configure a single WLAN/ESSID called “PHILLIES” for WPA-TKIP with 802.1x EAP-PEAP authentication to a Microsoft Internet Authentication Server (IAS) so our Windows XP laptop can automatically pass our Windows Active Directory credentials for authentication.

RFS7000(config)#wireless
RFS7000(config-wirless)# manual-wlan-mapping enable
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 enable
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 description 80211a
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 ssid PHILLIES
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 vlan 30
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 encryption-type tkip
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 authentication-type eap
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 radius server primary 10.1.1.100
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 radius server primary radius-key 0 RaDiUsKeY
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 radius server secondary 10.5.1.100
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 radius server secondary radius-key 0 RaDiUsKeY
RFS7000(config-wirless)# wlan 1 radius authentication-protocol chap
RFS7000(config-wirless)# exit
RFS7000(config)#

I’m authenticating users against the RADIUS servers at 10.1.1.100 and 10.5.1.100 with the radius key of “RaDiUsKeY” using CHAP as the protocol. Those servers are actually Windows 2003 Domain Controllers running the Internet Authentication Service (IAS).

Since I’m manaully mapping the WLANs I need to make sure I map the WLAN to the default 802.11a radio configuration with the following command. I’ll also set the AP to indoor, the channel selection to ACS and the power to 20mW.

RFS7000(config)#wireless
RFS7000(config-wireless)# radio default-11a bss 1 1
RFS7000(config-wireless)# radio default-11a channel-power indoor acs 20

You’ll obviously need to have the the RADIUS servers setup and you’ll also need Microsoft’s Certificate Server in your Active Directory. The clients will use the trusted root certificate to authenticate the login request from the RADIUS server.

I don’t think there are may people that haven’t figured out how to-do this (it’s really ease) so I’m not going to really go into the topic. If you have questions please feel free to post a comment and I’ll do me best to respond.

That’s a little taste of the RFS700, hopefully you’ll find the information useful.

Cheers!

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