Wireless Access

Hi Everyone,

 

I was asked a particular question the other day and I couldn't answer it because I was not sure how Airwave treated user roles in the Client Session Report.

 

This was what I was asked

"Presumably any client who has an entry with a 'post authentication' role also at some previous point had an 'initial role'  so called session, however, there are literally 0 occurrences of the same MAC having the 2 separate roles on separate lines when we run the session report

 

Is Airwave only using the last role?"

 

AMP Report configuration:

Under Client Sessions, only Session was chosen.

 

Report

ATTACHED

 

So I guess the question is can we report on a user initially connected to the wireless and then processed a captive portal and received a post-authentication role.

 

Use-case is coffee shops, marketing wants to know how many people initially associated and then processed the auth page to use the wifi service.

 

 

Airwave reads the user table at 5 minute intervals, so it is possible when airwave read the user table, the user was not in the logon role, just in the post-auth role.  You should just process users in the post-auth role and that will give an accurate picture.

 

Thx Colin.

 

We can definitely do that but we have no way currently of knowing whether associated users turn into "customer" by accepting terms and conditions and going into a post-auth role.

 

 

pmonardo,

 

Would the user be in the post-auth role unless they accepted the terms and conditions?

 

No they would not but the end customer wants to know how many associations
turn into valid sessions (post-auth role).

There is no way to track that since AMP polls every 5 min for client data.

We are also seeing tons of sessions with "-" as a role.....

 

 

Any ideas what this could be?

I'd be interested in knowing what the Auth Type and Auth Time are for these clients.  Most often, clients with a '-' role are unauthenticated (negative auth time is a 2nd way of confirming lack of auth), and typically have no usage.  This is often the case with traps as the trap doesn't always have a role line for clients. Role info is currently gathered through polling.

What do you need from me to show you?

On the client page:

Filter for role '-'

Columns to view: snmp source, assoc time, duration, auth type, auth time, usage

 

You'll often see clients in '-' role when the SNMP source is a trap.

 

 

Usage shouldn't be very high since it only constitutes auth requests and re-requests while the client is unauthenticated.

Here you go

Attached

 

This is a snapshot of the 9000+ clients in Airwave like this out of 22k currently...

 

Looks like the majority are phones and tablets.  My guess from your snippet is that they are in / around the environment, but not fully associating.  You could create a catch-all role that gives no internet/network access to any devices that haven't accepted the terms after a set amount of time.  This would help you get a role label that you can easily create a filtered report on.  Another idea along the same lines is to give that role a captive portal that redirects client back to logon role if they desire to get on the network.

Let me take these ideas back and discuss with people here, you make very interesting points.

Thanks again for your insights