WGB 350 mac address table and staleout

tgrundbacher · ‎06-24-2005

Hi

I would like someone to confirm my knowledge of the behaviour of the WGB 350 with the population of its mac-address-table.

My customer uses the WGB to connect multiple industrial PCs to the WLAN in a big hall. The PCs are placed wiedspread, and whenever a PC needs a code change, the customer connects the WGB to that respective PC so it can get serviced over the air.

Now he's running into a problem with the 8 MAC address limitation. I advised him to manually configure the MAC addresses of the PCs, that need to be serviced. Since the number of PCs has been increasing, he always needs to log in to the WGB from an already trusted PC to change the table to add the PCs MAC in service need.

I read of a staleout setting and the fact, that the WGB will clear its MAC table everytime you disconnect the ethernet cable. I can't confirm this because I don't have a WGB at hand, and the customer is located far away.

Question: Can I configure the WGB 350 to accept every MAC address (it's always going to be a single one at a time) as soon as you connect the WGB to a wired PC? Is this the default behaviour? Where can I find it in the web GUI? I am asking this because I was having troubles earlier before I upgraded to v8.89, wich solved some serious bugs (like losing the config).

Thanks for your help.

Toni

wdrootz · ‎06-30-2005

A single Workgroup bridge can support up to 8 MAC addresses. If more than 8 PCs are connected to the segment to which the Workgroup bridge is connected, the WGB will provide access to the first 8 PCs that it sees to connect to the wireless network. All the other PCs although connected to the same segment as the WGB will not connect to the Wireless network. For more information on Workgroup bridges have a look at the following URL.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps458/prod_release_note09186a008007f8d5.html

tgrundbacher · ‎07-04-2005

Hi wdrootz

Thanks for your reply. It partially answered my question. In the meantime I got my hands on a WGB 350 and found what I was looking for:

Do not stale out client nodes -> no

This is found in the 'Configuration -> Ethernet' menu (of the web interface - important to me!). It enables you to work with any kind of MAC address at any time on the wired side, as soon as you disconnect and reconnect again to a different PC.