2006 Nov 06 - Mon

Configuring Wireless on Cisco 871W with SDM

This was not a pleasant experience. No wonder I like CLI over GUI interfaces. With a command line, I get feedback as to what I'm doing wrong. With Cisco's SDM, it has some rudimentary user-interface checks before performing a post. On the other end, if you haven't put something into the UI correctly, at least for the wireless config pages, you don't even get a 'hey dummy' message, it just plain ignores you. No feedback, no hints, no nothing.

I simply wanted to get my wireless bit bridged to the vlan bit. The first step is to select the setting in SDM GUI to bridge the wireless with the wired. This will create the normal BVI interface. No problem there. After that, you go into the wireless configuration web pages. I simply wanted to get a WPA-PSK (Pre-Shared Key) into the unit. There is no obvious way to accomplish that task.

I ended up taking a configuration from a 1230 wireless access point, massaged it a bit, and dropped it into the 871. Which yields another beef: there are variations in how wireless is configured in a 1230 vs the 871. In the 871, the ssid and authentication stuff is in the 'interface Dot11Radio0' section. In the 1230, it is outside. Cutting and pasting therefore is not quite so simple.

So, after hours of diddling with the GUI, I did the following in a few minutes with the CLI:

interface Dot11Radio0
 no ip address
 !
 encryption vlan 1 mode ciphers tkip
 !
 ssid my ssid
    vlan 1
    authentication open
    authentication key-management wpa
    guest-mode
    wpa-psk ascii mywpapsk
 !
 speed basic-1.0 basic-2.0 basic-5.5 basic-6.0 basic-9.0 basic-11.0 basic-12.0 basic-18.0 basic-24.0 basic-36.0 basic-48.0 basic-54.0
 station-role root
 l2-filter bridge-group-acl
 no cdp enable
!
interface Dot11Radio0.1
 encapsulation dot1Q 1 native
 no cdp enable
 bridge-group 1
 bridge-group 1 subscriber-loop-control
 bridge-group 1 spanning-disabled
 bridge-group 1 port-protected
 bridge-group 1 block-unknown-source
 no bridge-group 1 source-learning
 no bridge-group 1 unicast-flooding
!
interface Vlan1
 description Wired Network
 no ip address
 ip virtual-reassembly
 ip route-cache flow
 load-interval 30
 fair-queue
 bridge-group 1
!
interface BVI1
 description $ES_LAN$
 ip address 10.10.10.254 255.255.255.0
 ip nat inside
 ip virtual-reassembly
 ip tcp adjust-mss 1452