LWAPP and unnamed network broadcasting

[mariner8905]

We have been in the process of converting all our cisco wireless equipment over to LWAPP and it is going well so far except that we have multiple wlan's defined even though we only want and need to broadcast one. but there is an unnamed network that is being broadcast as well. is there a way to disable it and if so how.

 

[nightowl]

I am not sure what you are referring to as the unnamed network, but the only SSIDs that you configured will be present on the controller(s). It is possible that the unnamed network is just showing up as the SSID that is configured to not be broadcasted. Where are you seeing the SSID at? A client? If it is the client, which software package are you using to manage the wireless adapters?

 

[mariner8905]

We are seeing this when we are looking at networks on our vista machines, as well as when we use net stumbler to look at the ap's, there are a lot of extra unnamed networks being broadcasted by each ap.

 

[spidey07]

Are you sure they are YOUR APs? Look at the BSSID or mac address of the AP sending out those SSIDs. The controllers/APs aren't going to send anything you don't tell them to. Also, remember it's best practice to broadcast all of your SSIDs and not hide them.

Your WCS server will also report them as rogue APs, provided they are not yours.

 

[mariner8905]

we are sure they are our ap's broadcasting it, we have enough of them that all the signals around us would be ours. also the mac addresses they are giving out are only one character off of the base radio mac address. we also cant broadcast all the wlan's, only the one, the others are so people are given the correct ip address since there are different roles for them.

 

[spidey07]

Well something is really wrong with the configuration then. I still don't quite understand what you mean by "unamed" SSID.

If you're not broadcasting the SSID probes and beacons will still be sent out for that BSSID (a wireless network) but they will appear as <ssid not broadcast> or something to that affect on your clients. Is that what you mean by "unamed" SSID? If so then that is completely normal and nothing you can do about it.

 

[mariner8905]

what i mean by unnamed network is when i open up the windows wireless network selection screen it displays all possible wireless networks that i can connect to. we currently are testing with a separate controller so there is a second ssid that i can see besides the normal one that we broadcast. but there is a third option that is called "Unnamed Network", it has all the same settings as our other ssid's and when i click on it, it asks for an ssid to the network.

 

[spidey07]

oh, that's completely normal then and nothing you can do about it. For example if you setup 6 SSIDs and put them on all access points but only enabled broadcast on a single SSID then you would show that SSID and the 5 others as unnamed.

I'd recommend you think long and hard about a good reason for not broadcasting them as it's strongly recommended that you do.