Here’s the thing about deleting your FaceBook account

When you finally reach the breaking point, you’re sick of all of the infighting and bickering, all of the people requiring that you look at things from their perspective, but refuse to see it from yours. When you have an opinion about politics that’s a bit too middle of the road for your left or right friends. When your family, your extended family, and/or your friends of your family engage in the kind of ‘behind the keyboard’ backstabbing, opinion tossing, open slandering of people that you care about – all because there are no repercussions – all under the guise of ‘I know someone better than you do’. When you’ve finally had enough and you go to delete your FaceBook account, you want to tell people. You want to educate them that the mire they’re drowning in, contributing to, addicted to – the social infighting, the ‘I’m better than you and here’s why’. Unfortunately when you compose a lengthy, well worded thought out op-ed piece on why you’ve finally given up on all of them, then delete your account – that post goes along with it. For those that actually reach the breaking point, then follow through with their account deletion, there is a narrow window of time between you saying goodbye to the world and that post being deleted for no one else to ever see. Fortunately for me, I have a blog and other social media accounts that for some reason have stayed clear of the close and personal infighting that’s the impetus for this post. I’ll be cross posting this blog post here (on sc-wifi.com) since it is technology related by way of it’s social media commentary – which has an odd tie to the technology I’m passionate about.

When my childhood friend decided today to make very public a private conversation with my older brother, people did what people do – decided to make assumptions about my brother’s intentions and decided they were going to turn into social commentators. Sadly, my friend did nothing to assuage the beratement that ensued, even encouraging it with comments about how recent holiday visits had been ‘awkward’. Couple that with his mother (and my mothers ‘best friend’) participating in the debasing spectacle assuming my brother was looking for ‘glee’.

Needless to say, it’s been far too long since I’ve made a stand. I’ve kept my political affiliation to myself (there is one person in the world that *knows* who I voted for, and I sleep next to her every night). You, dear reader, can make all the assumptions you want around who I support and why I support but I was raised that your political decisions are yours and yours alone. I try to keep a level head around the extreme on either side of the fence, trying to understand both perspectives, but the shameful display that occurred today, only has a single silver lining. That my sister in law had a chance to stand up for her husband. I’m ashamed to not have taken a stand before (I missed the last go ‘round) but it’s time to rectify that now. Clearly the longtime bond between our families has turned out to be just a sham.

Now, I’m getting ready to bring my second child into this world. I’ll protect them and my firstborn from the bullshit faux friends and infighting that’s ultimately the cancer that will cripple us all. You will not know about my child. You will not know if they’re boy or girl. You will not see pictures of them unless you text me (or I text you). This is not a challenge to repost, like, or otherwise solicit a response from you. It is merely a good bye. Your infighting has broken me. I’m done and it’s time I take a page out of my younger’s brothers book and say goodbye to FaceBook for good. In the narrow window between me posting this and deleting my account, if you happen to read it – please know – when you challenge my family, they will always wins out over you. It’s up to you how you support whom but when you call into question the goodness of a public servant – then expect that person to come rescue your ass when your house is burning down around you, you should know that despite the fact that you were an asshole to him, he’ll still help you.

The E is for Easy

I’ve been struggling to put into words just how straightforward configuring the ePMP 1000 from Cambium Networks is. While that may sound like something completely boring to write about, I assure you, once you’ve tried to administer or even out of the box configure Point to Point links from the likes of most anyone else, you really come to appreciate the simplicity and readiness of the out of the box experience that Cambium has so clearly focused on. The ePMP 1000 unit is part of the broader Cambium Backhaul and Access portfolio and can be used in a variety of roles depending on your network layout and your overall throughput and performance needs. Architecture and design topics aside, the biggest challenge I had with the evaluation units I received was making sure they had the latest firmware on them. Starting there (and that was even really straightforward), I applied the latest firmware to both units then cleared their configs. I took the remote side (Subscriber Module) and put it in the other room with local power applied to it. I then powered up the close unit and changed it to ‘Access Point’ then rebooted it. From this point forward, all of the other settings were optional including changing my hostnames, IP addresses, NTP servers, SNMP strings, etc. The point being, when they say ‘Quick Start’, they mean quick!

The SM (Subscriber Module) joined the AP (Access Point) as close to ‘automatically’ as I could envision a product being. Of course, just because they came up rapidly doesn’t mean they’re short on features or configurable options – there’s no need to stick to the default security settings, management settings, or any of the radio specific performance settings – all seem to be highly customizable and well worth exploring.

Easy to understand SM link info

One other ‘nice feature’ is of course the SNMP polling you’d expect from a good piece of network gear. While it may seem like a simple feature, the ability to setup MRTG at point it at a radio interface for downlink SNR was very easy to do. Here is the snippet I used from MRTG after changing my SNMP community strings:

Target[ePMPdownSNR]: 1.3.6.1.4.1.17713.21.1.2.18.0&1.3.6.1.4.1.17713.21.1.2.18.0:snmp_string@192.168.3.62:::::2
Title[ePMPdownSNR]: ePMP1000 downlink SNR
MaxBytes[ePMPdownSNR]: 100
Options[ePMPdownSNR]: gauge,growright,nopercent
PageTop[ePMPdownSNR]: <H1>ePMP1000 downlink SNR</H1>
ShortLegend[ePMPdownSNR]: SNR
YLegend[ePMPdownSNR]: SNR
LegendI[ePMPdownSNR]: SNR
LegendO[ePMPdownSNR]: SNR

and here’s what the resultant charts look like:

All in all, if you’re in the market for a new point to point solution, I’d advocate you go check out the ePMP and other Cambium products. They’re priced right and have the features that make sense.

Full disclosure: as a Wireless Field Day 8 delagate, Cambium Networks provided me a pair of ePMP 1000 units for personal use with no obligation to write about them. The above article is done at no cost or commitment to either the Tech Field Day organization or Cambium Networks.

As requested, here are some pictures of the gear itself.

Outdoor 802.11ac – doing it right.

When you talk about seeing the proliferation of 802.11ac devices, most often it’s with regard to indoor devices or at least ‘under roof’ devices. Until recently, there have been very few options for putting 802.11ac outdoors. One of the very good reasons for this wasn’t because of environmentals (you can put an indoor 802.11ac Access Point in a protective enclosure), it was about getting enough signal to and from your clients to be able to see any actual performance benefits. Cisco just launched their 1572 outdoor 802.11ac Access Point and as you’d expect, it sports many features that make it ‘a cut above the rest’.

I’ve been fortunate enough to play with a unit for the past several weeks and there are two of these features that I’d like to highlight:

Feature 1) Radio performance: These things are loud. I think the phrase ‘hella loud’ is more akin to what is reality. At 30dBm transmit power in UNII-3 (here in the states, FCC), it’s significantly more than what you’d be able to get out of a typical indoor Access Point (usually caps at about 20dBm). This means that more power out gets a cleaner RF signal to your client which means better modulation, which means faster speeds. That’s only half of the story though. What stands out is that Cisco went the extra mile and dramatically improved the receive sensitivity of these radios. This means that the AP can hear the signal coming from the client more cleanly which improves the clients ability to talk faster and get off of the air sooner. In mobile clients, this is the end-game for improving battery life. When you couple both of these things with high-gain antennas, you get significantly larger cell sizes outdoors with the awesome byproduct of actually being able to *use* the AP from a distance.

For comparison, you can see a sampling of the receive sensitivity values from a competitors outdoor AP. All values represented in dBm. Don’t forget that 3dBm is twice the power so each 3dBm is the equivalent of doubling your receive sensitivity!

Feature 2) PoE out. This is one of the most commonly asked feature that I find lacking in other solutions and it’s a simple one. The ability to hang a PoE powered surveillance camera off of an outdoor AP or even a PoE powered switch gives you the flexibility to take greater advantage of the investment you’re expending on the installation anyway. In short, if you’re going to run power, make it more useful to your infrastructure and business needs than ‘just to support an AP’.

If you couple these features with the other general awesomeness of the AP including ruggidization, real spectrum intelligence, 4×4 transmitters and receivers for 3 spatial streams, Fiber and cable uplink options, and field upgradability makes this the outdoor 802.11ac Access Point that you wish you had.