WLPC 2018
Attending my first wireless conference was a rewarding experience. Conference check in was Monday night with food trucks. It was great getting to meet the people you converse with on twitter and slack.
WLPC 2018 started with Keith Parsons welcoming everyone. Followed by 55 minute sessions, 30 minute sessions, Ten Talks, and Deep Dive Sessions. These were all very informative and it would take a book to cover them all so I will just share some of my notes.
RRM and You Blake Krone
Cisco
– Uses Neighbor Discovery Protocol
– Elect RF Group Master
– Build RF Neighborhoods =/> 80dBm
– Cost Metric: RSSI based AP load, CCI, ACI, Spectrum metric for DCA
– Cover Overlap Factor: used with Flexible Radio Assignment
Frames sent at highest power and lowest supported data rate
RRM is not a replacement for design or proper configuration
Configure RRM & Test
– Power levels – set max & min
– Use Profiles – HD areas vs non-HD areas
WPA3 Heather Williams
– Protected Management Frames (IEEE 802.11w) now mandatory
– Devices required to validate network authentication server certificates appropriately
– Standardizes the cryptographic suite (still 128-bit)
– Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE)
– Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) RFC8110
– Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP) to secure IoT
Does it Matter What AP You Buy? Wes Purvis
– Know your requirements
– Consider your clients
– Number of Transmitters affects AP Tx Power
– Know PoE Draw for your power budget
– Decide which model AP is best for your environment
Wi-Fi Pros Slack Manon Lessard & Samuel Clements
– Great resource to converse with other Wireless Network Engineers
– Allows more characters than Twitter
Filtering and Coloring Frames with Wireshark Joel Crane
– Operators – &&(if it’s this and this); ==(if it’s this); !=(if it isn’t this)
– Right click on something in a frame you can – apply as filter; prepare as filter; or colorize with filter
What to Blog About Lee Badman
– Take the first step
– Be yourself
– Have something to say, but don’t force it
– Put a fresh angle on the topic, whatever it is
– Write often enough to stay relevant
– Blogs aren’t novels
– Promote, and be promoted
– Don’t be thin-skinned, and keep your ego in check
– Any comments/feedback are worth responding to (almost).
My main goal was to learn more about packet capturing so I signed up for the Wireshark & WLAN Troubleshooting deep dive session. I thought I was prepared. I went into the session with Wireshark loaded on my Windows laptop to learn how to capture packets. Little did I know I was about to use Linux for the first time. It may seem strange that I’ve never used Linux in my career but I had managed to avoid it until now. After a brief moment of panic, I started the exercises and proceeded to learn a bit of Kali. It is a good thing I have a programming background even if it has been a decade since I programmed anything and that was C++ and Visual Basic. After the first deep dive session I went back to my hotel room, ordered room service, and started going over the material to get up to speed for the next day’s session. The way I approach my weak areas is to study until proficiency. I now have what I need to begin analyzing packets thanks to James Garringer!
Main takeaway from the conference for me was to start blogging. I thought it would be appropriate for this to be my first blog. I will be treating this as a technical journal for me. There have been many times that I found a solution to a problem and didn’t document. When the problem occurs again a year or two later I find myself struggling to remember the solution.
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