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Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients

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  • 1.  Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients

    Posted Jan 17, 2019 10:11 AM

    Hi guys,

     

    What is the best practice for disabling support for 802.11a/b/g clients. I am unable to disable 2.4Ghz entirely at this time so I need to support n at 2.4ghz and 5ghz as well as ac.

     

    From my reading, it has been suggested to remove data rates under 12 to stop 802.11b clients. What about a and g? My current SSID profile settings are as follows:

     

    802.11a Basic Rates 6 12 24
    802.11a Transmit Rates 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
    802.11g Basic Rates 2 5
    802.11g Transmit Rates 2 5 6 9 11 12 18 24 36 48 54

     

    I am also using DFS channels and have dot11a and dot11g radio profiles associated with my DFS channels to enable dot11h and VHT.

     

    So what is the proper way to achieve this?



  • 2.  RE: Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients
    Best Answer

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Jan 17, 2019 10:26 AM

    It depends on your environment really.

     

    It is usually safe to remove the b rates but I wouldn't completely disable support for a/g clients.  Whilst it is possible, there is usually always some device around that is connecting at a/g, particularly IoT types of devices.



  • 3.  RE: Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients

    Posted Jan 17, 2019 10:48 AM

    In my environment among 6000 clients, we only see 1 802.11a client, 3 802.11b clients and 2 802.11g clients so we do feel comfortable disabling support for them. Everyone else is n and ac spread amongst 2.4 and 5ghz.

     

    So with the current SSID profile rates that I posted, how would I go about disabling just b? And if we decide to go ahead and disable a and g as well, how would that be done?

     

    I came from the wired world so I'm still trying to get my head around all this RF stuff.

     

    Thanks for your quick response. And if you have any good resources for learning about this stuff, I would love to see that. Thanks!



  • 4.  RE: Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Jan 17, 2019 11:51 AM

    To disable b devices just remove the 1,2,5,11 rates in the 2.4 band.  A relatively safe bet is to have the min for both bands to be 12.

     

    To disable legacy completely and effectively put it into greenfield mode is done in the ht-ssid-profile.

     

    wlan ht-ssid-profile <name>
no legacy-stations

    I would be hesitant about doing that though since legacy clients on your neighbours wifi can end up transmitting at the same time causing collisions.  To be honest, I've never seen anyone do this in the real world anyway.



  • 5.  RE: Disabling support of 802.11a/b/g clients

    Posted Jan 18, 2019 10:11 AM

    So I changed the 802.11g rates to the following:

     

    802.11g Basic Rates: 6 12
    802.11g Transmit Rates: 12 18 24 36 48 54

     

    Can I remove 9 from the 802.11a transmit rates as well?

     

    I need to keep 6 on the .11g basic rates, correct?

     

    Thanks for your help.