Wireless Access

Hi everyone,

My company has an audit requirement that requires us to show what access points are detected in an area and then create a report with details on those detected access points. I am trying to get a clear answer as to what data VisualRF uses to display rogue access points. By rogue access points I mean any access point that is not mine (e.g. suspected rogue, suspected neighbor, etc.). My understanding was that this was configured by the RAPIDS export setting which is set to "Suspected Rogue" for my system. However if I run a report from RAPIDS for that location and compare it to what VisualRF is showing it is not a one to one match. Some access points are on VisualRF but not the report or vice-versa.

Does anyone know exactly what criteria VisualRF uses to visualize rogues and if I can create a report to duplicate that. I opened a case with TAC but they weren't very helpful...

Thanks,

Charlie

I am assuming that VisualRF would attempt to plot the location of the access point based on the "Discovery Events" portion of the Rogue AP screen.  That would require 3 or more access points being able to see the "Rogue" AP for that to be able to happen.  I would not expect any accurate results in terms of location due to the fact that a number of access points would need to see that AP within a certain time frame for Visual RF to guess the location, because unless access points are serving clients on the same channel as the rogue access point, it would not scan that channel often.

With that being said, look at the "discovery events" portion of the rogue AP section to get an idea of what access point saw the AP at what time.  Due to the great receive sensitivity of Aruba APs, you will see quite a few access points that are not even in the building...  You might want to use a handheld device to track down access points whose signal strength is very good.

Thanks for the reply Joseph. We understand that VisualRF is not super accurate but it was good enough for the reporting we needed. What I was hoping to get was a report of exactly what VisualRF was showing but I can't seem to find that.

I think I will end up doing a site survey and using those results instead of the reporting in Airwave.