1552E Question

[Dennis Kline]

We have a number of 1552e's deployed as RAP / MAPs, using a 5508 WLC.    All those are working fine.

I have a few requirements for an outdoor access point... not a RAP or MAP, but just a simple outdoor AP.

I assume that if I use a 1552e for that requirement, I would place the mode in local, rather than in bridge mode, correct ?  or does it matter ?

Also, a question on mac filtering.  When setting up the mac filter, there is a drop down selection for "interface name".  The radios seem to work fine with "none" selected, so I'm confused about what exactly that selection is doing.  Is it simply a reference lable, or does it actually have a purpose?

Thanks

It takes an Act of God to fade a wireless path, but any fool with a backhoe can cut fiber       

[Amjad Abdullah]

Dennies,

I have same situation like yours where I am using MESH APs (1522) as outdoor only. So, we are setting them all as "Root APs".

There is no local mode with MESH outdoor APs. It can only operate in bridge mode and it can be only RAP or MAP. So, if you want to use it as an outdoor then configure it as a RAP.

One more advice I can suggest is to configure each AP with its own bridge group name.

Before we had default bridge group name and for some reason if an AP loses its wired connection it falls back to MAP and join WLC through wireless. This does not allow us to track the down APs by AP operation status (no APs really down). Also, because our network is not designed to be a mesh network (only outdoor APs) we usually experience problems when APs that loses wired connection tries to find the optimum parent and some APs will flap million times between different parents. (again, the design did not parent election in consideration). so, if you have different bridge group name for each AP then you know an AP will never join the WLC if the wired connection is lost.

For the MAC filter question, mac filtering in WLC is mainly used for clients that connect to the wireless network. You can enable the MAC filtering on specific SSIDs and those mac addresses that are listed in the WLC (or externally in radius server) can only be authenticated.

For that reason you have interface configuration when you try to add a mac address in the mac filter. That allows the wireless user to be able to connect to the mentioned interface, not to any other interface.

This is obviously is not used for MESH APs mac filters. So if you leave it to none or if you use management interface it should work.

(once I added the mac filters via WCS using a csv file and left the interface name blank and it did not work until I use the "management" interface. It seems I should have used the word "none" as the interface name )

HTH

Amjad

Rating useful replies is more useful than saying "Thank you"

[Saravanan Lakshmanan]

I have a few requirements for an outdoor access point... not a RAP or MAP, but just a simple outdoor AP.

I assume that if I use a 1552e for that requirement, I would place the mode in local, rather than in bridge mode, correct ?  or does it matter ?

//Yes, Correct, place the mode in local.

Also, a question on mac filtering.  When setting up the mac filter, there is a drop down selection for "interface name".  The radios seem to work fine with "none" selected, so I'm confused about what exactly that selection is doing.  Is it simply a reference lable, or does it actually have a purpose?

//No worry about this setting when configuring this for Mesh.