Controllerless Networks

Hello

I have a network of 44 IAPs and I am trying to find an easy way to represent how many AP neighbors each AP can see (to get a feeling for the AP density).  The obvious place to check for this seems to be on each AP itself, but I cannot understand the numbers that are reported.  They just seem far too high. A Valid AP as far as I can tell is an AP that the Controller knows about. But how can it know about hundreds of APs when I only have 44?  Is it reporting the BSSIDs instead?  That might make sense.  Weird, but ok ... how do I then distill that down to actual Access Point neighbors? 

the command "show ap arm neighbors" has a final line that also tallies up the "AP neighbors"

Neighbor Summary:One hop 107 Two hop 0 Current Time: 2019-01-17 15:05:14

But is that the sum of Valid+Interfering "APs" ?

What I am after is a list that tells me how many IAP APs each AP sees, with an accompaning SNR.  If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

Those are bssids.  You can divide that number by the number of SSIDs you have and then divide that by two because you have two bands.

I did some more digging and I don't think it's this simple.  First of all, the total number of neighbors that the IAP reports includes EVERY BSSID that it hears (its own network as well as interferers). This means I cannot divide the number and come up with real APs.  And besides, if I have SSIDs that are single band only, then the divide by 2 logic doesn't work.  The other thing I found is that the neighbor output contains BLANK ESS fields. An IAP can see a neighbor with a blank ESSID???  

ARM Neighbors
-------------
bssid              essid             channel  snr  tx-power  PL (dB)  AP Flags  Last Update (Total updates)
-----              -----             -------  ---  --------  -------  --------  ---------------------------
b4:5d:50:aa:2d:81                    1        33   22        83       Passive
b4:5d:50:aa:2d:83  ACME-123          1        34   22        82       Passive
b4:5d:50:aa:b2:81  ACME-VoIP         1        39   22        77       Passive
b4:5d:50:aa:b2:83  ACME-123          1        40   22        77       Passive
b4:5d:50:aa:25:e1  ACME-VoIP         11       19   22        98       Passive
b4:5d:50:aa:25:e3                    11       19   22        98       Passive

When I look up the "blank" ESSID in the bss-table output, I can find it there, with an ESS :-)

b4:5d:50:aa:2d:81  ACME-VoIP      ?/?   172.20.7.120  g-HT  ap    6/22.7/22.7       0       b4:5d:50:c2:a2:d8  0        6d:13h:34m:51s

I am still on a hunt for my Aruba IAP neighbour count and getting very confused.  I am impressed at the low level nature of the CLI output (if I could make sense of it) but the GUI is supposed to make my life easier - and it's misleading.  Because in my initial posting I showed a graphic that said "Neighboring APs" ... and if I were a normal user I'd read that literally. An AP is an AP, and not a BSSID. 

Why would I care about the long list of BSSID's in a neighbor list? If an AP has 5 SSID's, then all of those SSIDs will be on the same band's channel.  Hence, no need to list the BSSIDs.  Just give me the AP neighbor and his 2.4 Channel, and his 5Ghz channel information.

I apologise if I mised something obvious but I am going in circles trying so answer a very basic thing.

It is not simple.

So the closest commnd that will show all bssids that are Aruba APs in the cluster that are  "in the air" is 

show ap monitor ap-list | include valid

The "valid" ap classification will filter on everything that is being broadcast by an access point in the cluster that the Ap's radio can see.  

If you SSH into the Virtual controller, the "show aps" command will tell you what the base mac address mac of each access point.  The bssid is an offset of each access point.

If you SSH into each AP And type "show ap bss-table" it will tell you what BSSIDs are attached to what APs, but you are right, it is not simple.

Thanks.  The output is still the same though. 

I see 160 "neighbors" in the GUI and in the CLI (all Valid) and this is a complete falacy.  To equate BSSID with "AP neighbor" is quite weird.    

The output even shows different SNR for the SAME 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz radio!!  I would expect that ALL SSIDs transmitted by a 2.4 radio would have the same Tx power applied and that means the neighboring APs would see the same SNR for that one APs SSIDs.

I think I have also got a bug in this IAP 6.5.4.8 code because I get lots of "blank" ESSID fields in the show ap monitor ap-list  output.  It doesn't seem to follow a pattern - quite random and affects all SSIDs and all APs.