Category Archives: Automation

B(eacon)s of Death: The full story

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Preamble

If you’re reading this, I have most likely already given a Ten Talk presentation at WLPC US 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. With only ten minutes to present, the information I shared was limited. This blog is meant to provide more details on how we resolved this issue.

Windows laptop blue screening while testing to try and resolve the issue

What would you do if you found out your Wi-Fi was essentially denial of servicing certain clients by causing them to crash? What if I told you this only impacted about 50 users total, approximately 0.001% of your client population? Would it change your level of concern or the amount of energy that you spent trying to solve this problem? Or would you tell those very few individuals to go away and get a new device? For me, every user’s experience matters and this is why I went through the process described in this blog to identify and resolve the issue (Windows laptops BSOD’ing) that was brought to me.

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Automating backups of your floor plans and AP locations using Python

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Background

At my new $dayjob, we’re undergoing a migration/refresh to Juniper Mist which will encompass over 13K APs when the dust settles. If you’re reading this, you already know that just performing a 1:1 swap for that many APs requires a lot of planning and resources. And depending on the size of your team, things may move faster or slower, or you may opt to contract out some of the work that’s required. Now, some organizations with large deployments choose to refresh portions of their network on a yearly cycle, let’s say 20% per year over 5 years. For us, that would have been a pretty manageable 2600 APs per year. However, given the variables listed below, we’re having to move fast (I mean like Jimmy Johns fast), but our team is small so we’re also having to pull in more resources, including external ones which can result in inconsistencies if left unchecked.

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