Those of you with active downloads of Aruba Utilities (2.7) will see version 31 soon - I published it today (15 February). Please let me know how you get on?
Best wishes,
Antar
Quick release notes:
- I took the decimal out of the version because Shawn Adams says it is of no use, and I agree. In old nomenclature this would be version 3.1.
Changes:
- Changed min level to 9 (Android 2.3) 2.3+ covers 98.4% of our installed base, and increasing to 2.3 allows some better native code options.
- Change to tab swipe format. See what you think?
- Added tab for controller commands. Swipe all the way to the right (but first set up the IP address, passwords etc in Settings). Press the wide button first, to login with credentials set in Settings. Then you can long-click select AP to select from a list of APs. Blink AP LEDs does what it says, to help you put a name to the AP you are staring at, and if you are brave enough, try Re-name AP. The Locate AP button plays an annoying beep that increases in pitch and frequency as you get a stronger signal, but I haven't tuned the feature yet. It takes 30 seconds to decay after you hit the button to stop it, so please be patient. If you prefer, use the edittext box to write your own command and use the Run Cmd button. What you are seeing on this tab is a home-made telnet client. It probably works better on a tablet screen than a small one. Special thanks to John Turner and Shawn Adams for suggestions for this feature. It's easy for me to add canned commands - let me know.
- Added settings menu for controller commands. If the options in Settings aren't obvious, please let me know. I'm asking you to check a box to enable the feature, enter an IP address for the controller, a userid and password for your account and an enable password. I don't need to add that if a device configured this way falls into the wrong hands, you have a security breach and need to change passwords - but I can't think of a better way that still gives ease of use. Let me know.
- Followed up on all crash reports and added checks for a whole lot of bad conditions.
- Fixed a bug comparing SSIDS as some are returned in “”. This was a change in recent Android code, but it's covered now.
- Cleared some views onDestroy(). With the Android lifecycle, where apps are kept in the background and only destroyed when Android needs the memory freed, it's difficult to know when to clear screens and history. I clear almost everything when the app ceases to be in the foreground, except the log and the controller tab. If you want to clear everything, use the 'exit' menu option.
- Added menu item to disable AirWave access. Although most of the app depends on AirWave, if you don't have it and don't want the app making http login attempts, uncheck this box. Thanks to Michael Klose for this advice.
- Rebuilt Aperf service to work with –i option, and reset button functions. This was a big job, despite the solid foundation left me by Mike Kershaw. It's running iperf as native code on an Android service, and that makes it an arms-length, boxing-glove relationship. It generally works well (single-threaded, you can only run one iperf at a time) in client and server mode (-s for TCP doesnt give any text output but it's working). If it seems to be misbehaving, punch the reset button. I added several messages in *** to show you what's going on, hopefully that's better now. Special thanks to Michael Klose for this, and to Richard Oldham and Aruba ACE team for helping with testing.
- Reduced AMC upstream bandwidth test length to avoid affecting performance. The AMC client makes a bandwidth measurement by sending and receiving a large chunked string to/from the AirWave server. Android finds this quite onerous on memory and real-time (my simplistic programming has something to do with that) so I cut down the maximum length of the string to make it less of a menace. There should be no visible effect - the bandwidth figure should be taken with a pinch of salt anyway, but it's a good indicator of how good the connection to AirWave is.
- Improved the accuracy of the ‘invalid cookie’ error message/toast. There were a few issues with AirWave login failures. I fixed a number of fixable ones. The most pernicious un-fixable error occurs when the AirWave server clock is set incorrectly - usually a couple of timezones ahead, e.g. the clock is set to 9:13am EST when in fact the time is 9:15am PST (sorry for US-centric example). When the http client logs in and receives a cookie, the expiry on the cookie is set to server time + 1 hr, and if the server clock is wrong (ahead of reality) it arrives already expired. And - this is the nasty part - the http client I use silently discards the cookie. So there's a check for that. The problem is difficult to solve because most AirWave instances are on VMs now and get their clock from the VM. Some browsers may see the same error on the same AirWave - if they are properly checking the cookie - but many do not.
Outstanding bugs
- Iperf -s option works (can bounce a client off it) but no text output for TCP (UDP is fine). See above.
- ‘Locate AP’ function with beep on Controller tab is not very accurate and can be annoying (stops after ~30sec). See above.
Outstanding improvements
- Http Error 503 response to doLocationLookupWithAssociatedApXmlPullParser() is not well handled – should have specific error report? This won't crash the app but the AirWave VisualRF stuff won't work.
- Display current settings in preferences. Android makes this surprisingly difficult to do.
- Try with the Broadcom test driver and see if we get more on the API. There's a publicly-available driver that supposedly gives a richer API than standard Android but I haven't had the time to try it yet.
- Graphical Iperf control. It's a pain writing in all those -i N -t 10 and not difficult to do something like jperf.
- Smooth heatmap edges.