Wireless Access

Hi there,

Some clients are complaining that the captive portal takes more times to display. I have a backgroud image JPEG 800K that can

be the reason. Any other things to check? Please advise.

Thanks.

Check the CPU on the controller:

show cpuload

Are you dropping broadcast and multicast on that Virtual AP?

Thanks for the response,

show cpuload

user 0.5%, system 0.2%, idle 99.3%

Are you dropping broadcast and multicast on that Virtual AP? No.

If you could drop broadcast/multicast on the Virtual AP, you could eliminate alot of the congestion/contention.  Could you try that?

Another thing that you can check is the "Show web-server" command on the CLI  and see the "Maximum supported concurrent clients <25-400>" value. By default this is 25, which means 25 users can concurrently access the controller for CP. If more than 25 users hit the controller for CP then the time to present the CP increases. You can increase the limit but beware that bumping up this limit all the way upto to the max will increase the memory untilization as the web-server is a memory hog. Make an anlaysis of roughly how many users connect to your network concurrenlty and then increase the value to that limit. Say you have a max of 60 users accessing the controller concurrenlty for CP then increase this limit to 60 or 75 max.

(controller-3600) (config) #web-server
(controller-3600) (Web Server Configuration) #web-max-clients 60

Regards,

Sathya

Hi Sathya,

Does this should be done on all controllers or just the master?

Regards,

Hi cjoseph,

Sure, I will give it a try and let you know how is the CP.

Thanks.

I am using CP for my guest login in a college envyroment. I expect that I will have a large number of users on at any given time. Should I use an external CP or the local CP due to the max number of clients? is Clearpass the solution for this? Please advise.

thanks

Are you authenticating guests already?

I have it setup in a test envyroment but only limited users maybe 5 or 10 at most just curious if i roll it out production im going to get hit hard.

I guess also dies it matter if im doing user login or just guest login. Im thinking im going with just guest login and using http for the cp page

The person who had those issues enabled drop broadcasts and multicast and increased the web server parameter.  I suggest you try those before you make any big infrastructure changes.  You can also plan on evaluating clearpass in the background if you would like, but unless you know how many users would be on a service you don't have already deployed, the internal captive portal should suffice...

I do have the bc/mc disabled and I have the CP logins ad default 25 but I am 100% certain as soon as I roll this out I will get more than 400 users. As I have over 1500 clients connecting to a guest network with open auth secured by ACL's on my network. Just wondering if CP local will be able to handle this.

The 400 limit # is that just for authenticating, once the user authenticates do they release the # back in to the pool or do they keep it as long as they are logged into the system? I would think this number is only for who is on the web page authenticating?

Quite frankly if you are serving up that many people on your open network, quite a few of them are probably phantom devices that automatically connect to an open network.  With that being said, I would test clearpass, not only for the scale, but for the options that you would need to service that number of people once you force them to authenticate.   The scaling numbers do not take into account what else you are doing with your controller at the time, so it might not be a perfect number to base all your decisions on.