After complaining about crappy WiFi coverage in my apartment, a friend loaned me a fancy fancy Aerohive AP230 – the gotcha was that I wouldn’t have access to the usual online configuration tool (a.k.a. HiveManager), so I had to learn to drive it via the CLI.
My needs are far more basic than the capabilities of this unit, but for my configuration I decided on the following:
- Same SSID and security as my existing WiFi
- Drop wireless clients with a weak 2.4 GHz connection
- Use band steering to encourage use of 5 GHz
- Turn off that bloody light!
After approximately equal quantities of Googling and swearing, I’ve settled on the following configuration:
no capwap client enable admin root-admin admin password *** radio profile Wifi1 radio profile Wifi1 band-steering enable radio profile Wifi1 band-steering mode prefer-5g radio profile Wifi1 weak-snr-suppress enable security-object Wifi1 security-object Wifi1 security protocol-suite wpa2-aes-psk ascii-key *** ssid SSID ssid SSID security-object Wifi1 interface wifi0 radio profile Wifi1 interface wifi0 ssid SSID interface wifi1 ssid SSID system led brightness off save config
After factory resetting the AP, connecting it to the network and SSH’ing in with the default user and pass (admin and aerohive respectively), the above configuration can be pretty much copy pasted after adjusting the ***s and the SSIDs.
A lot of the configuration above was stolen from the sites below (and you should definitely visit the first two sites for additional explanation of some of the CLI commands):
- Aerohive without Manager
- Configuring Aerohive Access Points-CLI Part 1: The Basics
- Aerohive CLI Guide for HiveOS 6.1r1 (AP320 and AP340)
(not the AP I have, but close enough..)
Other things I learned about WiFi along the way..:
- If you have multiple APs, set the SSID and wireless security options to be exactly the same if you want clients to be able to roam easily.
- Don’t use WPA2-PSK with TKIP (it’s older, slower and less secure). If you’re using pre-shared keys, always use WPA2-PSK with AES/CCMP.
- Definitely use some sort of WiFi site survey software (I used NetSpot) – without being able to see where the problems are, you really have no idea what the fix needs to be.