One of the Cisco Sales reps I work for called me a few months back and said hey why don’t we use a Cisco Wireless setup and client X to save them a bunch of money? My reply was…crap why didn’t I think of that followed by sure let me get to working on it. In the end we provided a solution that used Cisco 1240 A/G radios, two 5Ghz Point to Point panel antennas. We also got to use the 2.4 Radios for WiFi access on the insides of the buildings that the 5Ghz bridge was serving. Currently I am completing the config but once I have it all done I am going to post the juicy bits (sanitized to protect the client of course) as well as a few pics if the client will permit me to do so.
My company has done quite a few of these in the past. However this was my first go at a Wireless bridge setup. As usual with new projects I was a bit nervous but in the end I have been amazed at how smooth the whole thing went. Wireless connectivity has really jumped a level in my mind now. It was interesting though when I called one of our designers and then one of our engineers and asked “so now that my link is up how do I test the link quality and speed?” The answer was I’m really not sure they just work. For the moment I accepted the answer but in the end I have been troubleshooting a few things and I added my question to the list of things I wanted to solve by the time I handed it off to the client. So what did I find out? dot11 dot11Radio 1 linktest is the answer. If you are in enable mode and a Cisco AP with a 5Ghz Radio and you paste that command it will dump the results of a link test to logging. There are some cool custom changes you can make such as;
count Packet count per test
interval Interval between continuous tests
packet-size Packet size
rate Set test bit rate
target target MAC Address
And the output should look something like this;
GOOD (0 % retries) Time Strength(dBm) SNR SNR Retries
msec In Out In Out In Out
Sent :1000, Avg 1 – 64 – 62 33 34 Tot: 0 0
Lost to Tgt: 0, Max 2 – 63 – 62 46 42 Max: 0 0
Lost to Src: 0, Min 1 – 65 – 64 28 29
Rates (Src/Tgt) 54Mb 1000/1000
Linktest Done
A the end of the day this command gets the job done. I will be updating this story in the next few days. So if your interested check back or better yet add me to your RSS feeds.