Tab Modifier

If you have a large Aruba Networks deployment then you will know that all Aruba products display the same logo in the browser tab for their web GUI. This also includes their support websites and so often I have a browser with ten tabs all displaying the same icon and with truncated titles. I find this confusing as it makes navigating quickly to a specific server or device quite difficult. This screenshot shows the problem with multiple tabs open from different Aruba Networks products. They all look the same.

The solution I have found is to use a chrome extension called Tab Modifier. It allows custom settings to be applied to the tab based on different parameters. I have configured it to set different coloured icons and abbreviated titles based on the URL of the site. In the example below I have set Airwave to be a purple dot called AW and the Mobility Master is named MM but with the original icon. The red dot is a Mobility Controller and the green for Clearpass. This makes quickly navigating to the required device much easier.

Captive Portal Testing on Aruba UXI

The Aruba UXI (formerly Cape Networks) sensor is a useful piece of kit to help understand the status of a wireless network remotely and from the perspective of an end user. We have it set to test connectivity to our 802.1X Wi-Fi using some different credentials to check the function of different roles. However, one network that was missing was our guest network.
The guest network, in common with many UK universities is provided by the Cloud from Sky and is protected by a captive portal. I had always assumed that this would be a blocker for the UXI sensor but it turns out that they have a way to around this. Once an a guest account has been created then using a chrome plugin called "Aruba Recorder" if we perform the manual login and provide the output to Cape Networks support they can add this to the sensor and it will perform the user login. The full details can be found here.
Unfortunately at this time it isn't possible for the user to upload the recorder output but requires the Cape support to do this. Hopefully this won't always be the case.

Aruba AP-105 Beacon Stall

In ArubaOS 6.5.4.12 a problem appeared where some AP-105 stopped transmitting beacons on their 2.4GHz radios. From the status displayed they appeared to be working but no signal was detected at 2.4GHz. We discovered this during a RF survey and also when investigating a user complaint. 
Unfortunately both these locations were remote to our usual office so in order to find a more local instance I searched the controller and Airwave looking for APs that hadn't had any clients on their 2.4GHz radio for several days. From this a local visit and a packet capture next to the affected AP would show if the AP was in fact transmitting. From this I found an AP-105 in my building that was affected. A packet capture of the channel used by the AP showed that no beacons were being transmitted by this AP and only traffic from nearby APs was seen.
The issue could be resolved by rebooting the AP but could occur again or on different APs after some days. Aruba TAC indicated that the issue was a beacon stall where the transmitter locked up and stopped transmitting beacons. Checking the stats on the controller could show whether an AP was affected by executing this command twice and checking that the count increased:

show ap debug radio-stats ap-name "<AP-name>" radio 1 advanced | include beacon

To automate this Aruba provided an AirRecorder script that can automate CLI commands. It checked every AP to find the ones where the beacon count wasn't increasing. Therefore whilst waiting for a fix from Aruba we could locate the affected APs and reboot them.
One interesting subsequent failure mode was that after a while affected APs might start transmitting beacons but they wouldn't accept associations as they indicated they were unable to handle any more stations.

We took a unofficial (C) build that fixed the issue based on 6.5.4.12 and then it was resolved in 6.5.4.13