Category Archives: Uncategorized

PSA: Meraki APs don’t support TDWR channels, period.

This is not meant to be a bash post or anything like that, but more of a “public service announcement” for anyone who might have to deal with this scenario in the future and cannot find a ton of info online; I know I couldn’t.

Background:

I was on a work-related call today regarding a project to bring in a vendor that was going to leverage the 5 GHz Wi-Fi channels that we typically leave out of our channel plans for their own autonomous Wi-Fi network to provide connectivity for their client devices. Those unused channels are in the UNII-2e (or UNII-2C for the initiated) band, specifically 112-132. That’s not a small amount of spectrum that we give up, but we do it as part of our partnership with vendors who need the spectrum in order to provide their own networks for their solutions. I know what you’re thinking… We picked those specific channels because traditionally they’ve been known to have more problems than others with DFS events, but I can neither confirm nor deny that! Those channels were selected before my time here so I’ll claim plausible deniability on that one :). Anyway, nothing new for us there and back to the story…

It was noted on the call that Meraki does not allow channels 116-132 to be used and my antennas (wireless pun) immediately went up. “Hold up, flag on the play! That CAN’T be right. Are you sure?” is what I was thinking to myself. Admittedly, while I have worked on some Meraki tasks and troubleshot a few things since starting here, I have not completely delved into the world of Meraki to say much, if anything, definitively about their solution. So I kept my mouth shut and scrambled to log into our Meraki dashboard, trying to confirm what was said by someone who wasn’t even on our team; surely they had to be mistaken. And then I saw it…

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Building a power conversion tool in Python

I’ve been doing less and less Python development since moving to a new company back in June. At my previous employer, I worked on Python command-line scripts and a custom-built web app fairly often that assisted with daily, monotonous tasks as well as troubleshooting. I really enjoyed the process of learning more about Python and developing tools that helped not just myself, but also my team.

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ping localhost – where have I been?

Hey!

It seems like forever since my last post and I apologize for that but I have been particularly busy. Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the last month or so.

I was contacted by another organization on base that had some interest in hiring me; they serve as a service provider and network architect team for us. When they first approached me, I was very interested in the position. I would be working with a dual CCIE and a bunch of really smart guys that seemed to enjoy their jobs. I would get to work with a bunch of new technologies and products that I have yet to in my current role which is a definite bonus. However, one critical requirement existed that I did not have. I had to have an MCSE 2012 or MCITP Enterprise Administrator certification to even be considered. Continue reading

Data center migration – Part 1

Full disclosure: This is only my 2nd experience with migrating a data center and the first time I was working with a much smaller network and infrastructure in general with a stacked pair of 3750s using static routes, some L2 2960s and a couple of ASA 5510s.

This last experience is what I’ll be writing about. But first, let me give you some background on the data center before we moved. Continue reading

Intro

If you look in the dictionary for the word “packetologist”, you won’t find it. So what is a packetologist and why am I calling myself that? The truth is, I don’t even know what a packetologist is but it was something that my co-workers called me one day in jest and I liked it, so I decided to run with it. Despite being a means of playing around with me, I also believe they made this term up because they know the passion that I have for most things technology related, especially when it comes to networking. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, Continue reading