Frigging wifi

Spent most of my day trying to figure out why some people have trouble accessing our email server from within the company. Isolated it down to one single access point. It might be the connector or the access point. I have to get a ladder and plug the laptop straight in to the cable to test properly. I need to wait until every one has left for the day. Some days it sucks being IT.

What does it take? Ping all over the place. Ping flood all over the place. Narrow it down to the access point. Connect a wire to the switch the access point is plugged in to and give that a try.

The longest chunck of time was spent failing to locate a windows ping tool that does a ping flood. a ping flood is the source computer not waiting to send a packet immediately after the last one. The instant a packet is returned, another is sent. This is highly telling when you are trying to find hardware on your network that is dying or failing. It basically crams the pipe full and counts the number of failures. It is a stress test. It is handy. I cannot find a windows tool to do it. There are a million windows tools that all do the same thing. They let you ping a bunch of computers until they break. That or something along that variant. That is useful as well, but not what I'm after.

Thus, I have to boot a laptop in linux. The command $>ping -f &IP;IP> slams the connection and tells you how reliable it is. I need to find some piece of software that does this in windows. Getting a laptop to boot even recent linux is annoying and time consuming. Ubuntu finally bailed me out. Even the Wireless worked. Nice. I did have to boot back in windows and reactivate the wireless transmitter. Not sure what happened there, but it killed a good twenty minutes.

Now, even a 1% packet loss can be catastrophic for databases. Microsoft Outlook is basically communicating back and forth to a huge database that is getting hit by every other person also trying to access their email. I've been over this before.

I do not have an extra fancy access point lying around. I have to revive one of the old ones. This is not a big deal. While waiting for everyone else to leave for the weekend, I put together the old swap AP and swap it with the other new AP in a rarely used office. Now, I prepare that new AP to replace the bad one. I'm not even sure It is the broken bit at this point, but I need it just to test.

I hate it when the end of a bunch of testing doesn't give me solid results. I had a hard time telling what wifi I was using. Thank goodness for iwconfig in linux.