Having spent most of the last 5 years steeped in the HPE/Aruba networking ecosystem, I didn’t pay much attention to what Ubiquiti has been doing, as their primarily Prosumer and small business market segment didn’t significantly overlap with the large global customers I was working with at Aruba. HPE did venture into the SMB space with the InstantON product line, and have been reasonably successful at it, but the consulting work I was doing rarely went anywhere near that space. Now that I’m free of any competitive constraints. I’m taking another look at a product line that has clearly evolved.
About a year or so ago, I saw a marketing slide that surprised me, indicating that the #3 player in the Wi-Fi space (measured by total access points deployed) behind 800-pound gorilla Cisco and #2 Aruba, was, in fact, Ubiquiti.
Ubiquiti is a company that originally made a name for themselves by selling proprietary (AirMax) Wi-Fi-ish point-to-point and service provider gear, and eventually jumped into Wi-Fi. They quietly built themselves into a nearly US$2B/year operation by selling inexpensive (but broadly adequate) Wi-Fi hardware that appealed to small businesses, and they were largely ignored by the “Big Players” for years.
It had long been my own experience that the Ubiquiti ecosystem was decent but had some significant scalability limitations in terms of their management platform. This was especially clear after I got down and dirty with some absolutely massive deployments while working at Aruba. Over the years prior, I’ve deployed a number of Ubiquiti-based solutions and periodically watched them release a few products that were real stinkers (both hardware and software) or distractions from the core product line (anyone remember mFi? their solar product? the first 802.11ac access point to ship?). They gained a reputation (and it was largely deserved) by marketing the product as plug-and-play that required minimal engineering skill, along with a bunch of defaults that really weren’t doing anyone much good. They were the “cheap” brand, preferred by minimally competent “trunk-slammers” and customer bean counters and IT departments who didn’t really understand Wi-Fi, leading to a lot of really bad installations. They were also plagued by supply chain and quality challenges for a very long time.
But over the last several years, other consumer-focused companies like Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys (fresh off the utter debacle that was Cisco’s ownership of the brand), new players like Google (Nest) and Amazon (Eero), and eventually larger legacy players like Aruba (InstantON) started realizing that Ubiquiti did in fact have the prosumer market largely locked up. They decided they wanted a piece of that pie, right around the same time that the consumer market started realizing that it needed multi-AP solutions, especially in the US market where homes were growing ever larger, and all the while, ISPs were providing equipment was almost criminally cheap and awful.
This new competition ultimately proved to be a good thing for Ubiquiti, as complacency had been taking hold. The competition breathed new life into the company, who began to make some really smart hiring decisions on the product and development side.
Meanwhile, the founder of Ubiquiti, Robert Pera, decided to do as so many company founders with mountains of wealth do, and invested some of it into a professional sports team, the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association. Along with the team came the management and operation of their home arena, the FedExForum. As it would never do for a competitor’s networking product to be in the arena, the team set about deploying Ubiquiti’s Wi-Fi product to serve the arena, at a scale that the product had never been deployed before. This ultimately proved that the product can in fact scale, if given the proper engineering attention by someone who actually knows what they’re doing (their lead network architect is a good friend and colleague), and product support and development that can integrate feedback and the unique challenges posed by Large Public Venues. This gave the hardware and software some much-needed improvements.
Most recently, Ubiquiti put in a long-awaited appearance at Mobility Field Day 11, and got to present their product portfolio and roadmap to deeply experienced professionals in the wireless network space. They came to announce that they have been listening to extensive feedback from Wi-Fi pros (including yours truly), and how they’re starting to make moves into offering truly enterprise-grade products and services. In doing so, they’ve announced that they’re coming to play, and I’m hopeful that they provide some much-needed competition to the likes of Cisco (especially Meraki), Aruba, Juniper, Extreme, and Ruckus, in the same way the consumer players did for them. The big players have gotten complacent too, and it’s high time the market got shaken up.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the beta test audience for their MFD presentation and received a rather generous shipment of lab equipment in exchange for my time and expertise. Over the next several posts, I’ll go over the unboxing and commissioning of the gear and provide my thoughts on it. Stay tuned!
A while back, I posted about how to set up an Aruba wireless bridge using the built-in mesh method. Today I’ll show you how to accomplish a similar goal, but using the Wi-Fi Uplink approach. You’ll need to do it this way if you:
Need to connect an Ethernet Bridge to a non-Aruba network such as Starlink or a cellular hotspot
Need to connect to a network that is using 802.1X/EAP enterprise authentication
Need to connect to an Aruba network but can’t deploy dedicated mesh portals (because deploying an AP as a mesh portal disables any other VAPs configured on that AP’s group)
The setup is much like you would for a mesh AP, except we’re going straight to the mesh point, since the root is your existing infrastructure.
Perform the initial setup in the boot loader. IP address is optional, but since the AP will be in bridge mode, you may want an IP address to be able to manage it either manually or by adding it to Airwave. This IP address will exist on the uplink VLAN, and won’t be reachable even on the ethernet side until the uplink is active:
Power up the AP, either via PoE or external DC power (If your AP has a 12V input, I’ve found that a Type C PD to 12V cable is very handy for powering an AP off a standard Type C battery). Make sure you also have something like a laptop connected to the eth0 port because Instant gets a little cranky about operating when it doesn’t have Ethernet.
Your boot time will vary by your specific AP model, but I’ve observed the following boot times to be typical:
AP-514/515: 3-4 minutes
AP-303H: 8-10 minutes
Once the AP has booted up and the CLI is ready and not in degraded mode, log in.
Default credentials:
standalone mode : admin/admin
virtual controller mode : admin/<serial number>
Start with the initial configuration (initial clock set time is in UTC). If you need to configure DST, follow the instructions for clock summer-time:
clock set <year> <month 1-12> <day> <hour (24)> <minutes> <seconds>
configure
virtual-controller-country US
name AP-OPLECTIC
terminal-access
clock timezone EST -05 00
rf-band 5.0
no extended-ssid
wlan ssid-profile dummy_ssid_to_disable_setup_mode
disable
index 0
type employee
essid "Literally Anything, Nobody will ever see this"
wpa-passphrase aruba123
opmode wpa2-psk-aes
max-authentication-failures 0
rf-band all
captive-portal disable
dtim-period 1
broadcast-filter arp
dmo-channel-utilization-threshold 90
local-probe-req-thresh 0
max-clients-threshold 64
exit
This section is critical for two reasons:
The first is that you are setting your regulatory domain for RF operation. The access point will not turn on the radio until you set a regulatory domain. Any radio operations will still look like they’re running even if they’re not, and it won’t tell you that you forgot to set it… Ask me how I know, and which hairs turned gray from this!
The second is that you are creating a dummy SSID profile to tell Instant that you’ve configured the AP and so it will stop trying to enter SetMeUp mode. Disabling extended-ssid is critical to the ability to act as a wifi client, and it will not take effect until the AP is out of setup mode.
Continue with the following configuration. This establishes and applies your Ethernet port profiles. Your native-vlan number should match whatever you configured in the boot loader for the uplink-vlan:
wlan access-rule IAP_DownLink
index 4
rule any any match any any any permit
exit
wired-port-profile IAP_DownLink
switchport-mode access
allowed-vlan all
native-vlan 1
trusted
no shutdown
access-rule-name IAP_DownLink
speed auto
duplex auto
no poe
type employee
auth-server InternalServer
captive-portal disable
no dot1x
exit
enet0-port-profile IAP_DownLink
enet1-port-profile IAP_DownLink
enet2-port-profile IAP_DownLink
enet3-port-profile IAP_DownLink
enet4-port-profile IAP_DownLink
You only need to apply this profile to the ports that exist on your particular AP. If you’re using a 303H or 505H, or an outdoor AP with PoE output, you will want to make sure the poe setting reflects what you need. Applying poe to a port that doesn’t support it won’t hurt anything, it just won’t output PoE on those ports.
Continuing with the configuration of the WLAN station profile (for an SSID with enterprise auth). Your username will be in whatever format the NAC backend is expecting.
As of this writing, the CLI bank documentation does not correctly reflect the acceptable values for uplink-band, which are dot11g for 2.4 GHz and dot11a for 5 GHz. Make sure the allowed-band that you set up earlier matches this or it won’t work. Generally speaking, stick to 5 GHz.
Then follow with this to establish uplink priorities
exit out of the configuration context, save with write memory and then apply with commit apply, and reboot the AP with reload.
Once it’s back up, log back in and check that wifi uplink is configured with show wifi-uplink configuration.
Check to see the connection status with show wifi-uplink status. If it’s still in PROBE mode, run show wifi-uplink candidates to see if it’s found any APs to connect to. If it shows none, make sure you’ve got sufficient signal, and that you have in fact set your country code. If it’s showing that it’s associated, check the device connected to the e0 port and see if it can get an address (if you’re using DHCP), or configure one manually and try pinging both the AP and the gateway IP addresses. If that’s working, you’re done!
Yep. Another post about code. No, I’m not a software developer, I’m just a lazy network engineer who has an allergic reaction to doing GUI-based management of large environments. And thus I code because that’s a growing part of being a network engineer in the 2022.
A recent client project involving deploying a large fleet of Remote Access Points for teleworkers has required me to look at the Aruba Central API as a way of simplifying and streamlining the deployment of these APs to ensure consistency and completeness of the deployment. If you’re going to do anything more than about 5 times, it’s worth trying to automate it. If you’re going to do it 5000 times, you should automate it. I’m starting to get the hang of the AOS8 API and its many quirks, but Central is much more API-first than AOS8 which uses the API primarily as a frontend to the CLI.
If you have a remote workforce that depends on secure connections back to the corporate network, you should definitely check out the Aruba RAP solution. It beats the pants off software VPN clients (and at this point, how many teleworkers are even still wearing pants?). This solution has been available since almost the very beginning of Aruba nearly 2 decades ago and is mature and robust.
Like all of Aruba’s platforms, Central has a REST API that allows automation. The web frontend is essentially leveraging this API to work its magic. Aaron Scott, an Aruba CSE in Australia, has even built his own frontend to Aruba Central, because you can do that sort of thing when you have an API.
It’s got Swagger!
The Central API, like most, is documented with Swagger which allows you to browse and try various API calls to see how they behave.
I won’t rehash how to get access to it here, because Aruba documents the process very well in the Developer Hub page:
Note: once you’ve generated your token, make sure you download it by clicking “Download Token”. It will open a new window containing the JSON text with the actual token in it. Save this to a text file which you can use with your scripts later. Note the expiration time on this: 7200 seconds. This token isonly good for two hours. You will need to use the refresh token in there to keep it alive past the 2 hour window. The refresh token is good for 15 days. How? It’s in the docs listed above (yeah, I just dropped an RTFM on you!)
Programming with the API
(and a gratuitous plug for the Aruba Developer Hub)
If you want to access the API programmatically, you’ll want to use Python, although anything capable of making HTTP calls and processing JSON responses will work. Fortunately, Aruba has provided a Python library (again, on the Aruba Developer Hub – this site has a wealth of great stuff).
The documentation on how to install the Python libraries can be found on the Developer Hub. At some point, you’ll likely be referred to the documentation for the library on Read The Docs. This documentation is broadly good, but in some places omits a few key points. Most notably, any time you need to send data to the API in a POST call, it’s not immediately apparent that body data needs to go into the apiData parameter.
Plenty of examples on the Dev Hub, and what you do will depend on your workflow and what you’re trying to accomplish. It may be helpful to draw yourself a mind map of what steps are needed to perform a task, and then map out what API calls and Python classes are required to make them, as well as what input data it depends on. Practice good code hygiene and don’t ever put your tokens in your code lest you accidentally share it to the world when you share your code (this is partly why the tokens on Aruba Central are only good for 2 hours!). Instead refer to the token file I suggested you download earlier (which you can do simply by opening the file and doing a json.load to import the contents into a dict.)
It’s also worth noting that the Aruba Central API does not provide you with any access to the Aruba Activate provisioning system (this is a bit of an annoyance to me, but out of my control). This has recently been given a major overhaul and has been migrated to the HPE GreenLake Platform and is now under the GreenLake device management function. There is an API for many GreenLake functions (see also: the HPE Developer Hub), but from what I understand, the platform is presently still migrating the API. I’ll update the post as soon as it’s available. (and did you know that if you have HPE servers, the ILO management subsystem also has a REST API? API ALL THE THINGS!)
If you’ve been using Ekahau for a while, you probably already know how painful it can be to generate a list of APs from within a custom report template – and even then, it’s not the most useful thing in the world just for being in Word format.
One of the most underrated features of Aruba wireless hardware is its ability to be used as a wireless bridge. Running a cable to provide power and data to an AP is always the best way, but sometimes you just can’t get one there and have to go wirelessly.
With the release of Instant v 8.4, the concept of a mesh cluster name and key was introduced along with the AP-387 5/60GHz outdoor bridge. This mesh cluster mode lets the APs in the cluster establish their own mesh SSID and encryption, without the brain damage of provisioning those parameters on each device. This also introduced the concept of a standalone Instant AP, which allows you to run a point-to-point bridge or a multipoint mesh without the AP trying to join an existing Instant Virtual Cluster (VC).
Once a bridge is established, it is fully transparent at L2. Anything that shows up on the interface on the Mesh Portal AP will pop out the other side on the Mesh Point’s bridged Ethernet interface. You can optionally prune VLANs if you need to.
Key Terms:
WIRELESS MESH : one or more access points that connect to the network wirelessly.
MESH PORTAL/MESH ROOT: an access point in a mesh network that is connected to the network via an Ethernet connection. An Aruba AP configured for mesh will determine if it is a portal by listening for traffic on the Ethernet port. a given mesh cluster can have multiple portals.
MESH POINT: an access point in a mesh network that is connected to the network via one or more wireless connections to a Mesh Portal. Mesh points can also provide a wireless connection to another mesh point, but you don’t want to go more than one or two hops to a root bridge. If you have to go long distances, a linear mesh topology may be more useful. An Aruba AP will determine it is a mesh point in a cluster by either not seeing traffic on the Ethernet ports, or if the Ethernet port is set to bridging mode and has devices downstream.
MESH CLUSTER: A group of Aruba APs that are configured for the same mesh.
What you will need:
two Aruba APs that support Instant 8.4 or higher. Update them to the latest 8.10 or 8.7 LTS code trains if you can. I labbed this up on a pair of AP-515s, but the APs don’t necessarily have to be the same model of hardware, just the same software version. The Aruba mesh will operate on 5GHz.
A means of powering both APs. This can be PoE, but you’ll want the network on the Mesh Point side of the link to be an isolated Layer 2 segment from the one on the Mesh Portal, otherwise you’ll create a loop when the bridge comes up. It’s generally easiest to put a separate PoE switch on each end, making it easier to connect devices to troubleshoot. If using PoE, make sure it’s sufficient to run the AP.
Not strictly necessary, but helpful: A console cable for each AP. The 570 series APs use a standard USB Type C connection and ship with the requisite cable. Otherwise you’ll need either the “Orange Cable” (JY728A AP-CBL-SERU) that has a Micro-B connector on the end (this isn’t actually USB, so don’t even bother trying to use a standard MicroUSB cable), or the older TTL pin header to DB9 cable.
To start, hook up the console cable to the AP, and power it on. When prompted, stop the boot loader. Once at the boot loader prompt, issue the following commands:
sets the AP to standalone mode (ignores any incoming L2 Instant VC broadcasts and suppresses any outgoing ones)
Sets the AP to Controllerless (Instant)
Saves the environment variables
Boots the AP.
You can also do this from a booted AP on the AOS CLI by issuing the following commands:
write erase all
swarm-mode standalone
reload
Once the AP is booted up into standalone mode, you’ll need to log in via the GUI or the CLI (console or ssh) using the default credentials (admin/admin or admin/serial#), and set a new admin password. Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to create an access SSID to get it out of Instant’s SetMeUp mode. You can disable this later if the AP is not also being used for access (generally not a good idea on a mesh bridge, unless you’re restricting it to the 2.4GHz radio which is unused by the mesh.) If you’re using an AP-387, you don’t need to do this.
Once you’ve created this dummy/temporary SSID (easiest from the Web UI), go to Configuration>System>Show Advanced Settings, disable Extended SSID and reboot.
On the CLI:
conf t
virtual-controller-country US
name Mesh-Portal (or name of your choice)
no extended-ssid
exit
commit apply
reload
virtual-controller-country is vital here. The AP will not do anything on RF until this is set.
Once the AP is back up, configure the mesh:
no mesh-disable
mesh-cluster-name <cluster name> (If doing multiple bridge links, each one must have a unique name)
mesh-cluster-key <cluster-key>
commit apply
If you’re in a multi-VLAN environment, this is also a good time to set VLANs and such. If you’re just running a flat network, skip this part.
uplink-vlan <VLAN ID> (this is the VLAN the AP listens on)
#If configuring a static IP:
ip-address <ip-address> <subnet-mask> <nexthop-ip-address> <dns-ip-address> <domain-name>
conf t
wired-port-profile Mesh_Portal_Uplink-wpp
switchport-mode trunk
allowed-vlan <list of VLANs or "all">
native-vlan <port Native VLAN>
trusted
no shutdown
type employee
auth-server InternalServer
captive-portal disable
no dot1x
exit
enet0-port-profile Mesh_Portal_Uplink-wpp
enet1-port-profile Mesh_Portal_Uplink-wpp
exit
commit apply
Check the status of the mesh cluster settings with:
show ap mesh cluster status
It should look something like this:
Mesh cluster :Enabled
Mesh cluster name :Mesh_Lab
Mesh role :Mesh Portal
Mesh Split5G Band Range :full
Mesh mobility :Disabled
Now you’ll want to do the same process on the Mesh Point AP, plus the following to enable the bridging (you can also do this in the boot loader by doing setenv enet0_bridging 1 and savenv):
enet0-bridging
commit apply
reload
Once everything is booted back up, give it a few minutes to establish the mesh link, and then run:
show ap mesh link
Which will give you information about the link. the RSSI column is the SNR in dB. You can see from the flags that the link is running an 802.11ax/HE PHY (E), that legacy PHYs are allowed (L), and that it is connected to the mesh portal (K).
# show ap mesh link
Neighbor list
-------------
Radio MAC AP Name Portal Channel Age Hops Cost Relation Flags RSSI Rate Tx/Rx A-Req A-Resp A-Fail HT-Details Cluster ID
----- --- ------- ------ ------- --- ---- ---- ----------------- ----- ---- ---------- ----- ------ ------ ---------- ----------
0 aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff Mesh_Lab_Portal Yes 116E 0 0 4.00 P 22h:18m:57s ELK 55 1531/1701 1 1 0 HE-80MHz-4ss 29c8af3dec64e7c278bfcbfab07a2a3
Total count: 1, Children: 0
Relation: P = Parent; C = Child; N = Neighbor; B = Blacklisted-neighbor
Flags: R = Recovery-mode; S = Sub-threshold link; D = Reselection backoff; F = Auth-failure; H = High Throughput; V = Very High Throughput, E= High efficient, L = Legacy allowed
K = Connected; U = Upgrading; G = Descendant-upgrading; Z = Config pending; Y = Assoc-resp/Auth pending
a = SAE Accepted; b = SAE Blacklisted-neighbour; e = SAE Enabled; u = portal-unreachable; o = opensystem
From this point, you should be able to send traffic across the link, and you’re ready to go install the bridge in its permanent home. If running outdoors, don’t forget to ensure a clear line of sight and unobstructed Fresnel Zone.
In my previous posts about the ArubaOS API, I’ve given a general framework for pulling data from the AOS Mobility Conductor or a Mobility Controller. Today I’m going to show how to retrieve the AP database and dump it into a CSV file which you can then open in Excel or anything else and work all kinds of magic (yes, I know, Excel is not a database engine, but it still works rather well with tabular data)
The long-form AP database command (show ap database long) provides lots of useful information about the APs in the system:
AP Name
AP Group
AP Model
AP IP Address
Status (and uptime if it’s up)
Flags
Switch IP (primary AP Anchor Controller)
Standby IP (standby AAC)
AP Wired MAC Address
AP Serial #
Port
FQLN
Outer IP (Public IP when it is a RAP)
User
This script will take the human-readable uptime string (“100d:12h:34m:28s”) and convert that to seconds so uptime can be sorted in your favorite spreadsheet. It will also create a grid of all the AP flags so that you can sort/filter on those after converting the CSV to a data table.
The code is extensively commented so you should be able to follow along. Also available on github.
#!/usr/bin/python3
# ArubaOS 8 AP Database to CSV output via API call
# (c) 2021 Ian Beyer, Aruba Networks <canerdian@hpe.com>
# This code is provided as-is with no warranties. Use at your own risk.
import requests
import json
import csv
import sys
import warnings
import sys
import xmltodict
import datetime
aosDevice = "1.2.3.4"
username = "admin"
password = "password"
httpsVerify = False
outfile="outputfilename.csv"
#Set things up
if httpsVerify == False :
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', message='Unverified HTTPS request')
baseurl = "https://"+aosDevice+":4343/v1/"
headers = {}
payload = ""
cookies = ""
session=requests.Session()
## Log in and get session token
loginparams = {'username': username, 'password' : password}
response = session.get(baseurl+"api/login", params = loginparams, headers=headers, data=payload, verify = httpsVerify)
jsonData = response.json()['_global_result']
if response.status_code == 200 :
#print(jsonData['status_str'])
sessionToken = jsonData['UIDARUBA']
else :
sys.exit("Login Failed")
reqParams = {'UIDARUBA':sessionToken}
def showCmd(command, datatype):
showParams = {
'command' : 'show '+command,
'UIDARUBA':sessionToken
}
response = session.get(baseurl+"configuration/showcommand", params = showParams, headers=headers, data=payload, verify = httpsVerify)
if datatype == 'JSON' :
#Returns JSON
returnData=response.json()
elif datatype == 'XML' :
# Returns XML as a dict
returnData = xmltodict.parse(response.content)['my_xml_tag3xxx']
elif datatype == 'Text' :
# Returns an array
returnData =response.json()['_data']
return returnData
apdb=showCmd('ap database long', 'JSON')
# This is the list of status flags in 'show ap database long'
apflags=['1','1+','1-','2','B','C','D','E','F','G','I','J','L','M','N','P','R','R-','S','U','X','Y','c','e','f','i','o','s','u','z','p','4']
# Create file handle and open for write.
with open(outfile, 'w') as csvfile:
write=csv.writer(csvfile)
# Get list of data fields from the returned list
fields=apdb['_meta']
# Add new fields for parsed Data
fields.insert(5,"Uptime")
fields.insert(6,"Uptime_Seconds")
# Add fields for expanding flags
for flag in apflags:
fields.append("Flag_"+flag)
write.writerow(fields)
# Iterate through the list of APs
for ap in apdb["AP Database"]:
# Parse Status field into status, uptime, and uptime in seconds
utseconds=0
ap['Uptime']=""
ap['Uptime_Seconds']=""
# Split the status field on a space - if anything other than "Up", it will only contain one element, first element is status description.
status=ap['Status'].split(' ')
ap['Status']=status[0]
# Additional processing of the status field if the AP is up as it will report uptime in human-readable form in the second half of the Status field we just split
if len(status)>1:
ap['Uptime']=status[1]
#Split the Uptime field into each time field and strip off the training character, multiply by the requisite number of seconds an tally it up.
timefields=status[1].split(':')
# If by some stroke of luck you have an AP that's been up for over a year, you might have to add a row here - I haven't seen how it presents it in that case
if len(timefields)>3 :
days=int(timefields.pop(0)[0:-1])
utseconds+=days*86400
if len(timefields)>2 :
hours=int(timefields.pop(0)[0:-1])
utseconds+=hours*3600
if len(timefields)>1 :
minutes=int(timefields.pop(0)[0:-1])
utseconds+=minutes*60
if len(timefields)>0 :
seconds=int(timefields.pop(0)[0:-1])
utseconds+=seconds
ap['Uptime_Seconds']=utseconds
# FUN WITH FLAGS
# Bust apart the flags into their own fields
for flag in apflags:
# Set field to None so that it exists in the dict
ap["Flag_"+flag]=None
# Check to see if the flags field contains data
if ap['Flags'] != None :
# Iterate through the list of possible flags and mark that field with an X if present
if flag in ap['Flags'] :
ap["Flag_"+flag]="X"
# Start assembling the row to write out to the CSV, and maintain order and tranquility.
datarow=[]
# Iterate through the list of fields used to create the header row and append each one
for f in fields:
datarow.append(ap[f])
# Put it in the CSV
write.writerow(datarow)
#Move on to the next AP
# Close the file handle
csvfile.close()
## Log out and remove session
response = session.get(baseurl+"api/logout", verify=False)
jsonData = response.json()['_global_result']
if response.status_code == 200 :
#remove
token = jsonData['UIDARUBA']
del sessionToken
else :
del sessionToken
sys.exit("Logout failed:")
The human-readable output of the show ap database gives you a list of what the flags are, but the API call does not, so in case you want a handy reference, here it is in JSON format so that you can easily adapt it. (Github)
sheldon={
'1':'802.1x authenticated AP use EAP-PEAP',
'1+':'802.1x use EST',
'1-':'802.1x use factory cert',
'2':'Using IKE version 2',
'B':'Built-in AP',
'C':'Cellular RAP',
'D':'Dirty or no config',
'E':'Regulatory Domain Mismatch',
'F':'AP failed 802.1x authentication',
'G':'No such group',
'I':'Inactive',
'J':'USB cert at AP',
'L':'Unlicensed',
'M':'Mesh node',
'N':'Duplicate name',
'P':'PPPoe AP',
'R':'Remote AP',
'R-':'Remote AP requires Auth',
'S':'Standby-mode AP',
'U':'Unprovisioned',
'X':'Maintenance Mode',
'Y':'Mesh Recovery',
'c':'CERT-based RAP',
'e':'Custom EST cert',
'f':'No Spectrum FFT support',
'i':'Indoor',
'o':'Outdoor',
's':'LACP striping',
'u':'Custom-Cert RAP',
'z':'Datazone AP',
'p':'In deep-sleep status',
'4':'WiFi Uplink'
}
Another quick bit today – this is the basic framework for using the REST API in ArubaOS. Lots of info at the Aruba Developer Hub. This is primarily for executing show commands and getting the data back in a structured JSON format.
However, be aware that not all show commands return structured JSON – some will return something vaguely XMLish, and some will return the regular text output inside a JSON wrapper (originally the showcommand API endpoint was just a wrapper for the actual commands and would just return the CLI output, as it still does for several commands)
You can always go to https://<controller IP>:4343/api (after logging in) and get a Swagger doc for all the available API calls – although owing to system limitations, the description of those endpoints isn’t generally there, but it can be found in the full AOS8 API reference.
This blog entry does not deal with sending data to the ArubaOS device.
Just a quick post today to highlight a couple of my favorite ArubaOS v8 CLI commands of the week.
The first is show configuration diff <node A> <node B>. This handy tool lets you compare what’s different between two different hierarchy containers. Great for chasing down obscure config items.
The second is show references, followed by a profile type and name – it will tell you all the profiles that reference the one provided. Very handy if you’re trying to clean up cruft and want to find profiles that are abandoned and no longer useful, or if it won’t let you delete a profile because it is still in use (where it will annoyingly not actually tell you where)
It’s not uncommon for architects and interior designers to get on us wireless guys for cluttering up their aesthetic, so I always try to get on their good side whenever possible. They don’t tend to complain about “necessary” stuff like light switches and fire alarms, but for some reason, they never see network infrastructure as “necessary”.
Near The Floor. Sometimes, the wall finish is such that using adhesives or screws is practically a capital offense. It could be fabric, glass, metal, or whatever. At that point, you’ll usually have a baseboard upon which to mount them, just make sure it’s not going to get damaged by floor cleaning processes. Another reason to go close to the floor is to use the floor to create a shadow when deploying near an open hole like an atrium or a stairwell. You don’t generally want your beacons from one floor being visible on another, as that can really confuse a map that is not aware of floor holes. It’s also important to always place a beacon near every “portal” at each floor (doors from stairwells, elevator lobbies, and so forth) so the app knows when you’ve changed floors and to switch maps when navigating.
On The Wall. I’ll explain in a minute why you want your beacons as close to the user as possible. What this generally means is that you want to go on the wall most of the time. In terms of spacing, you should generally be within 3-4m of a beacon anywhere in the building. Being closer to your beacons will improve accuracy, and greater beacon density will reduce latency (but only to a point, it typically takes 2-5 seconds for the app to get a new fix because it has to listen for all the beacons it can hear) .
On The Ceiling. Suboptimal, but works in a pinch. Suboptimal mainly because even standing directly under the beacon, you’re usually at least 2m away from it.
Now for the engineering reasons behind all this: It all comes back to the old friend that wireless engineers everywhere love and cherish: free space path loss. Except here, we’re making constructive use of it.
Determining distance based on triangulation of beacon RSSI is optimal within about 0-4 metres due to the inverse square law of RF propagation. Typically, the calibrated output of the beacons is 0dBm (1mW). They operate in the 2.4GHz band on a 2MHz advertisement channel tucked between Wi-Fi channels 1 and 6, as well as one just past channel 11, and another one just below channel 1. My colleague Joel Crane explained BLE frequencies in 60 seconds (when he was at Mist, now he’s at Hamina after a brief stint back at Metageek)
There’s also some variability between receiver devices in terms of their sensitivity and even based on internal antenna configuration and how the device is held/oriented, so let’s just assume it’s +/- 3dB for the purposes of this example because it makes the math simpler.
Free Space Path Loss, Illustrated by my good friend and colleague François at Semfio Networks
When the receiving device sees a BLE beacon, it then determines its distance from that beacon based on the RSSI (and uses the beacon’s ID to correlate it with the device’s placement on the map). When it sees a beacon at -35dBm, it knows it’s under a metre away. If it sees it at -55dBm, that could be anywhere between 4 and 8 metres away. So the farther you get from the beacon, the wider that margin of error becomes. Any walls that get between can also add 3dB or more of attenuation depending on the materials used. (just like they do with Wi-Fi, since we’re dealing with the same RF frequencies, just at about 1/1000 the power).
Below 1 metre, every time you halve the distance you gain 6dB – so 50cm would be -34dB, 25cm would be -28dB, 12.5cm would be -22dB, and now we’re getting really close to the beacon, and it’s already lost 99% of the transmitted power… Also worth noting here that when you mount them on a metal surface, you gain a little bit back, but if your surface is less than one wavelength (~12cm) wide, the math gets tricky and I won’t go into it here.
What this means for placement is that you want to get them as close to the receiver as possible, usually within 4m. This generally means at a height of 1-2m on walls, and between 40 and 55 inches is ideal, since it avoids hips, shoulders, and carts which could damage the beacon or outright rip it off the wall (and collisions with a hip or shoulder is not fun for the owner of the hips and shoulders either… ask me how I know). They can also be placed on ceilings, but as I pointed out previously, in an office building, that usually means you’re never going to get closer than ~2m to the beacon even if you’re standing directly underneath it. Beacons near the floor are about a meter closer to the receiving device than the ceiling would.
In a recent deployment, the basic beacon grid (best practice: 10m) was deployed on the structural column wraps, which were spaced about 12m apart. The gaps in the middle of the squares formed by 4 columns were filled in with AP based beacons (which isn’t always dead center due to some variability in the AP placement within those squares). In the common central areas on each floor, we had to fill some of those gaps with additional beacons to get within about 4-5m and provide greater accuracy due to the various obstructions, as well as place beacons near the areas where traffic enters and exits those spaces.
In locations where there are particular aesthetic concerns, it is usually possible to paint the beacons and their mounts to match, as long as the paint does not contain any metallic materials (lead, aluminum powder, gold leaf, iron oxide, etc.), or you can apply a vinyl skin. This also applies to access points. Check with your vendor to make sure it will not void the warranty (as it tends to do with many vendors). You can also often find snap-on paintable covers for indoor APs if you don’t want to paint them directly.
Applying this to design methodologies
So how do you plan out a beacon deployment? Same way you generally would with any RF planning. Ekahau supports modeling BLE access points (although it cannot survey them, much to my annoyance). At this point you want to set your BLE coverage requirements to the RSSI required for the most distance you want to be from the beacon, which is -52dBm, and you want to make sure that within that coverage level, you can always hear at least 3 beacons.
How it works with clients
(added July 2022)
How Bluetooth beacons work with clients is the subject of a lot of confusion on the part of the end users, especially those who are concerned about tracking, especially with the rise of Apple’s AirTags (more on those in a minute) and other personal item trackers.
The good news is that a BLE beacon is nothing more than a small circuit that blips out a small identifier at regular intervals (Aruba beacons do so every second). It has no idea where either it or you are. Generally speaking, the payload of the beacon is very small, consisting of a major ID and a minor ID. Other ancillary data can go in there as well.
BLE Beacon Frame Format (source: Mokoblue.com)
The Major ID generally identifies the beacon type, and the Minor ID identifies the individual beacon. If you open up a BLE sniffer, you’re surrounded by beacons almost everywhere you go. Your smartphone sees all of them, but if it had to look up what every single one does, it would nuke your battery in very short order. So what happens is that when you install an application that makes use of beacons, it tells the OS (IOS or Android or whatever) that it wants to know about any beacons with a certain Major ID. The OS then asks the user if they want to allow the app to receive data about nearby network devices (IOS, I don’t know offhand how Android does it).
Once the app has permission, any time the OS sees a Major ID that has been registered by an app, it will send that beacon info to the app, which then processes the data. Apps like Meridian that do location then have information from the back end that tells it where each beacon is located, and from that, based on the signal strength of the beacon, it can multilaterate the user’s location. Waze uses this approach to provide additional location in satellite-weak areas like tunnels. But anyone with an app that knows what to do with a particular beacon can benefit from it.
Which brings me to how Apple AirTags work. Apple has done a really good job of creating an asset tracking solution that ensures the tag owner’s privacy. An AirTag is still just a BLE beacon (with some extra stuff), and the Find My app has registered the Major IDs with the OS (from the factory – and it doesn’t have any special access to the OS). Where AirTag got really clever, is the Minor ID/payload is the owner’s public key (which is unique to that specific tag). This keypair is generated when the tag is activated If it’s detected by someone other than the owner, that device takes its location (from whatever source the OS location services has), the signal strength, and the time, and encrypts that using the public key, and uploads it to Apple’s servers. Only the owner of the tag who has the private half of that key pair (stored in the device’s TPM) can decrypt the payload. And if a particular device sees someone else’s tag with a constant signal strength as the device moves around, after a while (an hour or two) it will determine that someone may be using a tag to track you and warns you. A few months ago, my daughter went on a school band trip and borrowed my suitcase, which still had an AirTag buried in it from a recent trip to Europe. About halfway across Iowa, almost 100 kids in three separate buses (including my daughter) simultaneously got an alert on their iPhones that an AirTag might be following them. They all found this incredibly amusing.
Tile’s product works in a very similar manner, but I don’t know if it does the encryption thing (which is likely patented by Apple). Apple’s product benefits from a much broader client detection base due to Find My being installed on every iPhone, so anyone with an iPhone can see and handle an AirTag. Handling a Tile beacon requires the Tile app to be installed (and some bluetooth devices like headphones are able to be located with Tile), which limits the reach. As far as I know, there’s nothing that would prevent Tile from adopting the Find My device spec. There have also been some Proof-of-Concept deployments where BLE-capable infrastructure such as Aruba Wi-Fi can also report these types of beacons back to their respective service providers.
