Editing Radio Alias question

[dennisma]

I have three AP's (on chan 1,6,11) that I want to rename instead of looking at their MAC addresses. I can do this for one AP but with the other two AP's I have an issue.

They both have the same MAC address except for the last octet. One is :58 and the other is :54. When I try and edit one of them the "Edit Radio Alias" box displays the MAC address but displays the last octet as :5X. It appears to be wildcarding the last digit of the last octet because when I change the name of one, it changes the name of both of them.

So if I name one of them "Lab4 AP" both of them (the ones ending in :54 and :58) will be rename.

I appears to be by design and I am curious why and is there a way I can get around this.

Thanks.

[ua549]

It seems that the mac addresses are on the same physical unit. That's why they change together. You can rename the AP's using the management software for the device. The logical view will display the SSID. Select the SSID and you'll see the associated mac addresses.

[dennisma]

It seems that the mac addresses are on the same physical unit. That's why they change together.

No. No that is not the case.

I have 3 distinct APs. Two of these AP's have exactly the same MAC address except the last octet (as I said before). In other words all octets are the same except the last (aka least significant octet or 6th octet). One ends in :54 and the other :58

For example they look something like this 01:23:45:67:89:54 and 01:23:45:67:89:58

When I edit the alias of the one AP that is not similar (ends in :74) it works fine. But when I edit either AP that ends with :54 or :58, it renames both of them.

Here are some screen shots to show what I mean. The first image shows the MAC addresses (blurred on purpose). Two of them are exactly the same except they end in :54 and :58 (the other one :74 is not the same). I am trying to edit the one that ends in :58.

Notice that the Edit Alias dialog box says :5X



When I rename the AP that ends in :58 it changes BOTH the :58 AP and the :54 AP as you can see below.



That "X" in the :5X in the Edit Alias dialog box makes me suspect it is wildcarding all AP's (like :5*) because that is exactly how the software is behaving.

I hope this makes things clear.

[Joel]

Thanks for posting the screenshots! In all MetaGeek products, we have two ways of grouping SSIDs:

Physical Grouping: Where we group together virtual SSID's on the same AP.
Logical Grouping: Where we group together all of the SSID's that are part of the same network.

Each SSID has to have a unique MAC address for networking to work like it should, so if you have a few virtual SSID's on the same AP, the AP will just increment the last octet of the AP to differentiate them, like this:

D1:2F:45:FB:58:A2 - MetaGeek-Guest
D1:2F:45:FB:58:A3 - MetaGeek-Private
D1:2F:45:FB:58:A4 - MetaGeek-Test

So to inSSIDer, the AP's MAC address is D1:2F:45:FB:58:Ax, since the last nibble gets incremented, the x is a wildcard. We assume that those MAC addresses are the same AP, so when you name one, they all get named together.

The only vendor that we know of that departs from this naming scheme is Ruckus, who increments a nibble in the middle of the MAC address, and this does break this functionality in our software.

I'd say that there are two possibilities for what is going on here:

1. Your vendor increments MAC addresses in a non-standard way (it would be interesting to hear which vendor you are using)
2. This is a freak incident where have three AP's with random MAC addresses, but they just happened to all be identical except for the last nibble. Crazy!

[dennisma]

Joel thanks for the response.

I replied to your email to me but just to post it here the vendor is TrendNet and the AP's are all TEW-653ap.

I see now what is going on. These AP's only support 4 virtual SSID's so TrendNet probably staggers their starting hardcoded MAC address 4 apart from each other.

So my first AP has a MAC address range ending in :54 to :57 if I created the max number of virtual SSIDs. The other AP just so happens to start at :58 which the very next number.

So if anyone else is having the problem I had look at the MAC addresses. If they are the same except the last nibble then per what Joel said inSSIDer assumes it is physically the same AP.

[chechito]

1. Your vendor increments MAC addresses in a non-standard way (it would be interesting to hear which vendor you are using)
2. This is a freak incident where have three AP's with random MAC addresses, but they just happened to all be identical except for the last nibble. Crazy!

routerboard (mikrotik) accesspoint modify radio interface in the following way:

first ssid of radio
11:xx:xx:xx:xx:11 (radio physical mac)

second ssid of same radio
13:xx:xx:xx:xx:11

third ssid of same radio
13:xx:xx:xx:xx:12

also take in count that if initial radio hex value is BF for example, the incremented value will be C0