Cease and Desist!

My ISP (Speakeasy) sent me a nice letter recently informing me the Eurpopean Union's copyright infringement division was displeased with me. The said that based on these allegations, I would be in violation of the Speakeasy Acceptable Use Policy. "How can that be?", thought I. I buy my music on iTunes, I do not partake in bittorrent, limewire or any other version of the now dead Napster (old school version not the new subscription based system) music/file-trading system Hell, I pay for stuff!. I have encoded all my purchased CD's and boxed them away but I keep them to myself. In fact I am a true supporter of "legitimate" digital music use via iTunes or any other service that, in some way, supports the artisits that create the music I love. This includes freely distributed music a la Radiohead.

So why was the European Union comin after me? Speakeasy's Tech Support and Security groups were very helpful in pointing out to me that they could track streams of file sharing originating at my IP address. So I thought deeply about this (for 2 seconds) and arrived at the most logical conclusion. My neighbors were connecting to me via Free The Net, the Meraki based San Francisco free wifi network and uploading/downloading music to their hearts content. I have 2 repeaters on my roof and 4 others in houses nearby providing firewalled access to the Internet. This made me sad. I was very pleased to provide an un-asked for service to my neighbors who may not have - or may not be able to afford - Internet access. I wrote to Meraki explaining my dilemma and asked of there was someway to restrict my neighbors from conducting file trading on my network.

People in my hood are sharing music over my wireless network and
abusing my speakeasy acceptable use policy. Speakeasy.net has warned
me that any continued abuse will result in disconnection of my
service. Therefore I must inform you that unless you can lock it
down so only port 80 is being used I will have to disconnect the
Meraki repeaters and access points from my network.

I am very sorry. This seems like a real shame. I was very eager to
participate in "Free the Net" but now I am a bit saddened that folks
are abusing it.

Please get back to me and let me know if there is anything you can do
on your end.

They replied back with...

Hey Bruce,

grr. that's really irritating. but actually what's surprising is that
we haven't had to address this issue so far. as far as blocking
everything but port 80: I don't think any of us would be happy with a web-only Internet connection, so that doesn't seem like a good answer. to me it seems the real solution here would be to figure out who the culprit is and block them.

I looked on your gateway and didn't see anyone transferring an
inordinate amount of traffic. do you happen to have any idea who it is? do you know if it is bittorrent they are using? maybe they are using a different gateway at least part of the time (probably mine, hehe).

next week I guess we can figure out how to set up the right counters on your gateway so that we can figure out who it is (any insight or additional info you can provide would obviously be super helpful). hopefully Speakeasy can wait that long. if you need to unplug, we understand, but leaving your repeater plugged into power would at least soften the blow.

ugh,

So far they have found no way to track or stop the activity and I love my Speakeasy service. So I have no choice. Until such a time as I can trust my neighbors not to conduct activity that the European Union deems as illegal or until Meraki finds a way to filter this traffic out, I must disconnect my network from "Free the Net". I still have repeaters on my roof but they are no longer connected to my network, file traders now siphon off some other guys pipe or tube or truck that backs up and unloads Internet.

Comments and suggestions, as always, are very welcome.

WiFi Enabled Bag!

OK, Admission. The previously lauded WiFi enabled Shirt SUCKED! It had this big plasticky velcro'y patch on the front. I just couldn't wear it. I thought it would be more integrated. So...

My wife the genius (BTW, she is a geek, too. She really wanted me to order her one. So I did). She takes one look at her shirt and says, " I am not going to wear this but I have an idea."

She tears the shirt apart and buys herself a new bag/backpack/purse. She cuts a hole in the front of the bag for the cable. Sews the felt backing used to secure the velcro to the front of the bag. Puts the battery pack and cable into an internal pocket and away we go. WiFi enabled bag!!!

This is way more cool than the lame shirt. Now she carries this to work proudly, letting all around her know if they can surf via WiFi or not.

WiFi enabled shirt?!!!

As if some geeky clothing designer and an Uber-RF-Nerd had a dorky lovechild, ThinkGeek has launched the first WiFi enabled SHIRT!!!

I am not kidding. this a a wearable WiFi detector that illustrates the strength of the WiFi signal with glowing bars and antenna and the words, "802.11" underneath.

I cannot wait to wear this to the next, "I can't get a date with nobody/Star Trek/D&D/comic book/video game/networking convention"

Look, Drool and count the days till it is released.

The Myth of the Self-Monitoring WLAN

Recently, as you all probably know by now, Duke University had a WLAN meltdown. The CIO, Tracy Futhey (Comment here) and the assistant IT director, Kevin Miller (Comment here) have put to rest the notion that the Apple iPhone caused it. Cisco has issued an advisory to the effect and Apple assisted in the effort.

I am not going to go into the details of what happened or why. Suffice it to say that mobile handhelds of all types, not just iPhones, send a lot of ARP traffic and the Cisco infrastructure was not ready for it. The quote at Network World explains that, "The advisory finally makes it clear that the iPhone simply triggered the ARP storms that were made possible by the controller vulnerabilities. Any other wireless client device, moving from one subnet to another apparently could have done the same thing."

What I will point out, however, is the problem we in the Wi-Fi community have today with the following simple delusion, "Your WLAN infrastructure as a cohesive, integrated, single-vendor solution is all anybody needs. It is self monitoring and self healing." I talk to a lot of people about which WLAN solution they are going to purchase and implement and I am always surprised by how many believe that the AP and controller vendor has all the answers. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of this type of solution. Central management is critical for even medium sized organizations of 50 or more APs, much less larger ones that may a few hundred or even thousands. Manually changing the configuration of each AP is not a viable solution in these cases. The Admin needs assistance. And the story sounds so great, "Implement our solution and it will fix itself when it breaks and protect itself when security policies are breached." Who wouldn't want that?

But the truth is a little more complicated. As we have seen from previous posts, sometimes the solution doesn't behave the way your business practices need. Similarly, sometimes there are security problems within the infrastructure itself. So what to do?

This will sound like an advertisement for the company I work for and I apologize ahead of time but there is a very good reason I continue to work there. Mainly, I believe in the message.

When the Duke network went down and the Assistant IT director looked at his WLAN infrastructure dashboard, what did he see? I have not spoken with him directly but my guess would be it said, "hey man, it ain't me. Everything looks good from my end" So what did he do? he pulled out a sniffer and got to work. With packet traces in hand and assistance from Cisco and Apple he solved the problem. Did the infrastructure fix itself? Did it correctly identify the problem and solution? No. A patch is now needed to keep this from happening again.

One should not blame the infrastructure for not getting this right at the outset nor should one blame Mr. Miller. He was correctly reading what the controllers were telling him. But it shows how important it is to have a separate, 3rd party solution also available to get down to the bits and bytes or even spectrum analysis (if the problem should be something other than 802.11 protocol madness.)

There are a few great WLAN security vendors out there and they make 3rd party, best of breed solutions for monitoring the security of your WLAN (one of which recently got snatched up pennies on the dollar and will probably be rolled into another integrated, self-healing, self-monitoring role; against my better judgment.) There are an even smaller number who both monitor your security and your connectivity and performance and give you great troubleshooting tools built-in (insert shameless plug here). These should be your trusted advisor's when things go wrong. I am in no way suggesting that they would have identified the problem and cause and given a solution at Duke either (although I think they at least would have shown alerts for denial of service and strange traffic behavior.) What I am suggesting is that with them in place you now have a set of tools to assist in solving the problem. Remote packet and/or spectrum analysis. Alarm thresholds that can be set by the admin and will continue surveillance. Reports. System-to-system notifications. Graphs of speed and traffic type. Lists of who is connected to what and how. All the things you would need to get to the bottom of any problem in that invisible Luminiferous Ether.

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Cisco Ripples - DCA and RRM - Help is on the way

Since I first published " The Ripple Effect" back in February I have heard from many folks who have validated the effect but to my chagrin, I have had no solution to offer. Well thankfully there are smarter people than me out there and solutions have started to appear.

I was alerted to the fact that Medical Connectivity consulting recently put Cisco in their sights and quoted my blog with regard to Dynamic Channel Assignment and RRM causing issues. The Web, being the great time waster that it is, lead me on a journey. As I read the article I clicked here and there and next thing I knew I was looking at a forum at Cisco that was talking about this exact phenomena.

One of the forum posters had some great suggestions to eliminate this problem in the future. Bruce Johnson at Partners Healthcare offered this solution,

"We saw the majority of DCA events were triggered by Interference from Rogue APs. After we disabled Foreign AP Avoidance the number of channel changes dropped by an entire order of magnitude (1000s to 100s). We disabled Cisco AP Load Avoidance and this reduced the number of DCAs within an order of magnitude (100s less).

DTPC will power-up APs to max levels to provide a 3-neighbor -65 RSSI coverage "grid" and 7921s will power up to follow suit (up to their max Tx Power). Other clients with higher Tx power may send the APs to max power causing a mismatch with IP phones.

You can decrease the tx-power-threshold so the "grid" won't be as hot (default is -65, change to -71 or -74):

config advanced 802.11a tx-power-control-thresh <-50 to -80>
config advanced 802.11b tx-power-control-thresh <-50 to -80>

and reduce the coverage hole detection threshold (reduce Min SNR level in RRM Thresholds) to suppress the power-up activity."

Bruce seemed on track with this fix. the problem is that it isn't a fix. It shuts off the RRM and DCA so that the WLAN would remain stable. So where is the benefit of a controller based system?

He does note that a fix is forthcoming from Cisco, "They are revamping the behavior of RRM in the WLC 4.1 Maintenance release." Which is later confirmed by a Cisco employee, Saurabh Bhasin a TME,

"With the 4.1 Maintenance Release(MR) due out on cisco.com shorly, many improvements based on such feedback have been brought into RRM's algorithms ? improvements aimed at allowing administrators to fine-tune their RRM-run WLANs where desired. These enhancements will allow for greater control over both the channel and power output selection algorithms, so administrators may assist RRM in being either more or less aggressive in such decisions, depending on application and network needs. Additionally, enhancements have been made to the management and reporting of all RRM information and configuration alterations to allow for better tracking of RF environmental fluctuations and to assist in keeping track of RRM activity. Further technical detail on the inner workings of these enhancements will be available very soon in an update to the above-mentioned RRM Whitepaper."

The paper he references is found here http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/114/rrm.html and explains a lot of what we are all seeing. (here is the PDF version)

So here is to hope that WLC 4.1 Maint. Rels. fixes it. As an aside, Bruce Johnson is skeptical,

"Its all well and good to make things work for Intel and the CCX/CCKM compliant crew, but if you have any of the other brands of WLAN NICs (like those made by medical device manufacturers, who won't subscribe to fast roaming features until they're adopted by the IEEE) you are best keeping RRM disabled until it delivers on its promise as stated in the following 802.11TGv Objectives draft:

Service and Function Objectives

Solutions shall define mechanisms to provide the service listed below.

[Req2000] TGv shall support Dynamic Channel Selection, to allow STAs to avoid interference. Solution shall be able to change the operating channel (and/or band) for the entire BSS during live system operation and be done seamlessly with no intermittent loss of connectivity from the perspective of an associated STA. Solution shall not define algorithm for channel selection."

Meraki - Staunton, VA

Another great grass roots wifi project is being lead by a group of folks out in Staunton Virginia. With 19 nodes up as of today, the 3rd of May, it looks like it is doing well.

Again, I must say, citizens and grass roots efforts beat out commercial or governmental efforst all the time. Less bloat, less waste. These efforts are similar to the way we as world citizens take it upon ourselves to act responsibly on the road, or by taking the effort to recycle our bottles and cans. It is also parallel to the user created content wave sweeping the Internet. Not only do we want to get news and opinion our own way we want to get services our way too. And just like we don't mind spending some of our time to create that content we do not mind spending some our time and bandwidth to add wifi services.

Drop in on Staunton VA and take a look at http://www.stauntonwifi.org/ and let them know what a great job they are doing!

My Meraki Mesh Node - Update

Meraki is a pretty cool company. I don't say that just because I am some bleeding heart liberal (even though I am) and they have a rather humanistic desire to get inexpensive Internet connectivity out to "the next billion people". Nor do I say it because they like to be polite network citizens and not go for the capitalistic jugular. But also because they have their head in the right spot and treat people decently and still make money doing it. nice. Liberals want to get rich too!

Not long after getting the free (as in "beer") Meraki node set up I purchased two new minis. I purchased these to learn about how they work and for fun and to "hack-on". I mean, heck, they were pretty inexpensive. Soon after I put these nodes up using the same SSID as Meraki's project so they would associate to it and I gave them to my neighbors. At this point Meraki contacted me. I guess they were monitoring the "Free the Net" WLAN and they sent the following note...

Hi Bruce,

We noticed that you ordered a couple of Meraki Minis and have set up your own network with the name "Free the Net". We are very psyched that you're so motivated and excited to help out with the project, and we'd love to help out. :) For starters, you definitely don't need to spend your own money, we'd be delighted to provide Minis for any of your neighbors who you can get involved. We would also really love to have the repeaters in the "Free the Net" project be in our existing network in Dashboard, so that they'll all show up on our one network map and we can see the aggregated usage numbers and all of that in one place. I totally understand that as a WiFi guy you'd probably like to play around with Dashboard some yourself -- could we offer to send you a couple more Minis to play with, and let us add your neighbors' repeaters to our existing network?

Thanks a bunch, and again, we appreciate your help with the project!

What great folks! A few days later 2 more nodes showed up and now I have two to "Play" with and two that will soon be migrated to the "Free The Net" project. I have all four up now on a new SSID and when I attach my laptop to them I get a nifty splash page from Meraki. This is of course because my new mesh of 4 (lets call them "Unchained") automatically saw another Meraki node ("Free The Net") and linked to it. as an aside, I think, if I plug one of my "Unchained" nodes into my Internet connection they will dis-associate from "Free The Net"

Now here is the real surprise, After you click the, "Take me to where I was going" link you get a new bar at the top of your browser window that scrolls advertising for local businesses. Now, I have no idea if these businesses are paying for this. I assume they are, but who knows. But think of the revenue opportunities.


The bar is very discrete. Thin and lean. the rotating text ads are very low key and I didn't even notice it for quite a few days. Also there is a request for input in a box if you click the "?" icon.


Lastly, there is a "search local" box that allows you to search for businesses and other stuff in your local area based on your Latitude and Longitude (actually, the Lat Long of the node you are associated with). Very hip.


The Result then takes you to a Google Local page. Nice.


All in all, when you add this idea and the strategy to get a percentage of money that Meraki makes off of your monetizing you own mesh hotspot, the large orders of nodes going to other cities and countries desiring a quick and easy way to get their citizens connected to the Internet and the fact that Google buys Meraki nodes to extend their mesh into peoples homes and businesses, Meraki is poised to pay off that Sequoia investment in nothing flat.

Meraki - Dallas freenet

Entrepenuership in action. If you want to see how another mesh deployment is going, cruise on over to http://www.dfwfreenet.org/ and see how they are doing. they have a great wiki and a node map up and running. So far they only appear to have 5 nodes up and running but I could see this going big. Support them by laying out a measeley $49 bucks for your own node and go to town!

Meraki Node - Management Details

The Meraki mesh node I got has been up for a week now and here are my thoughts. Well, first of all, It is pretty neat. 'nuff said. I had some questions that I posed to Ben Chambers of Meraki and here are the answers.

The first thing I wanted to know was why it beacons every 500ms instead of 100ms. Twice per second did not seem very much and considerably off the norm. Ben stated that, "As far as the beacon interval goes, the reason is basically that if you have a fairly high number of repeaters (say, 20) within range of each other, 10 beacons per second per node gets pretty excessive." This makes total sense to me.

The next question was whether there was a way to configure the node or at least monitor it. I was told that because it was a free node belonging to the Meraki "Free the Net" project I would not be able to configure it but I would be able to monitor it in a variety of ways:

1. I can see if it is up by associating with it and browsing to http://my.meraki.net/ where I would see a splash page. Click on each image to see a larger version of the image.

2. I can Select the "Advanced" link in the upper left and get a page that lets me run a throughput test to the internet.

3. I can select another link on the advanced page that allows me to set a static IP and some other functions.

4. I can also get to a page that is just for my repeater at http://sf.meraki.net/myrepeater/00:18:0a:01:10:b3 which looks like this:

5. I can also get more data from a more public view of the Meraki network from this URL http://sf.meraki.net/overview which shows me connected to another mesh node way over in Potrero Hill, at least a mile away.


6. I was also pointed to a site where there is XML data for Google earth. http://sf.meraki.net/earth . You must save the source as a KMZ file on you hard drive and open in Google Earth.

After which, it now looks like this in Google Earth. Notice the mesh links (I made them yellow, the better to see them with.)

Which now allows me to go down to sea level and see the line of site to the other link

Pretty impressive. My next step would be to get some Meraki Minis and connect them to the mesh and see how they work out. More fun for next time :-) Talk to you then.

My Own Mesh Node - Meraki comes through!

Here is the view from my roof of downtown San Francisco. Looks like a good place for a Mesh Node!


Last Thursday, Ben Chambers and Jessica showed up on my doorstep from Meraki Networks with APs in hand. I was psyched! We were about to hook up an outdoor node to the Meraki San Francisco trial.

They brought over a Meraki outdoor AP, a toolbox and a lot of cable and got right to work. We went up on the roof to check it out and find a spot to put it. Then we went indoors and talked about how/where to bring the cable in. The unit is powered by a proprietary POE (Power over Ethernet) injector which I plugged and hooked up to my switch.


Ben went back up onto the roof and connect the AP to a plumbing vent pipe. It came with what appears to be a 12dbi antenna (I will check and get back with the details).


It got link and pulled a DHCP address from my home router and started broadcasting the SSID FreeTheNet and we were done.














We chatted awhile and then they left. The were super nice and obviously loved their jobs. Later the unit started upgrading itself and is now running a newer OS than what it originally had. I checked that evening and found I was up on the website at http://sf.meraki.net/ but unfortunately none of my neighbors had a Meraki node close enough to attach to mine. I am going to drop in on Ritual Coffee later this week and get them to join the network as well as some of my neighbors.