Wireless Water Cooler

We frequently assign contractors to install AP's at several building sites. It takes months in some cases for them to submit their site maps showing which rooms the AP's were installed in. How can we use the relevant controller commands and/or Airwave to locate these AP's?

For reference we have 7030 and 7210 controllers running AOS 6.4 and Airwave 8.0.9.1.

1.  Use the Ap LED command to flash and unflash APs:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_6.4.4.x_WebHelp/Web_Help_Index.htm#ArubaFrameStyles/1CommandList/ap-leds.htm

2.  Use Airwave's "Run a Command to Flash AP LEDs":  

3.  Use Aruba Utilities to locate Access Points on your Android Smarphone:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arubanetworks.arubautilities

4.  Turn on advertise-AP-Name in the SSID profile so the AP name can be seen in Airmagnet Survey Pro and Ekahau Survey programs:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_6.4.4.x_WebHelp/Web_Help_Index.htm#ArubaFrameStyles/1CommandList/wlan_ssid_profile.htm?Highlight=advertise-ap-name

Just a bit more clarification for the individuals who have responded so far. These AP's are located on premises in over a hundred remote sites that we manage over a WAN connection. While not impractical to visit these sites it would be best from a management perpective and from a resource availability consideration to remotely identify these installed AP's. Thanks for the responses so far.

GaryB,

 

We need to know alot more about your situation to understand what you need.  When you say locate, do you mean remotely?  Why can they not be identified now?  Do they not have power?  Can they contact the controller?  What is your exact challenge?

 

These AP's are provisioned and communicating with their respective local controllers. The problem is they are named with a standard format such as APX001-Serial Number. What we want accomplish is to rename APX001-AX00009435 to Rm230-AX00009435. What we are currently doing to identify the approximate location of these AP's is a form of triangulation.

We first run the command (7030Somewhere) # show ap database | include APX

We next run the following command (7030Somewhere) # show ap arm neighbors ap-name APX001-AX00009435 | Include Active

00:1a:1e:64:25:75  Some-A            6        24    12        90       Active    2015-11-26 09:08:45(275202

05:1k:1e:51:47:45  Some-A            6        16    18        88       Active    2015-11-26 09:08:17(254048

d8:h8:n6:b4:15:75  Some-A            1        43    12        61       Active    2015-11-26 09:08:29(347766

Then lastly we run (7030Somewhere) # show ap bss-table | include d8:h8:n6:b4:15:75

d8:h8:n6:b4:15:75 Some-A N/A   10.147.46.196  g-HT  ap    1/12/20.5         0       Rm231-AJ0265325     0        29d:16h:53m:0s   1500  -          104  T

 

Therefore APX001-AX00009435 sees Rm231-AJ0265325 the loudest. Using this methodology we can get an approximate location for  APX001-AX00009435 and deploy it in Airwave to the correct room. This process has given some good results so far but if there is a much better process that can be adopted we would appreciate any suggestions in this regard.

 

Was just curious, are the switch port descriptions/interface/jack #s, etc being created/provided by the electricians at the same time the APs are being installed?

They simply terminate the drops on the patch panel to switch ports configured by the network team. 

GaryB,

 

If you have to locate them without being present, I think you are doing everything you can..