Transmit AP Name in Aruba Instant

Having the Wi-Fi infrastructure transmit the AP name is one of those useful things that not everyone knows about. It means that a network engineer can see the system assigned name rather than a BSSID saving valuable troubleshooting time. Each vendor does it in a slightly different, proprietary way that means that it is usually only professional tools that will decode them. Until recently Aruba Instant deployments didn't have this functionality but this changed with release 8.4.0.0. Interestingly there was no mention of this addition in the release notes, however, the CLI reference guide does describe it.

All that is required is to add the command advertise-ap-name to each SSID profile required. Here is an example:

CORP-AP01# conf t
We now support CLI commit model, please type "commit apply" for configuration to take effect.
CORP-AP01 (config) # wlan ssid-profile AyeFi_CORP
CORP-AP01 (SSID Profile "AyeFi_CORP") # advertise-ap-name
CORP-AP01 (SSID Profile "AyeFi_CORP") # end
CORP-AP01# commit apply
committing configuration...
configuration committed.

As a consequence the APs will transmit their name as a VSA in the beacon frame as shown below: