WLAN overboard

NOW THAT COMPANIES are embracing wireless networking, the problem arises: How do you manage all of those access points? For the most part, access point management solutions were designed in simpler times, such as when you might have only a half-dozen of these devices in an office. Even if the management software that comes with the access point was a little clunky, it didn’t really matter, as there wasn’t a lot to do anyway.

But now that companies are buying enterprise-class wireless products in enterprise quantities, limited management just won’t do. Along with an enterprise-class wireless installation, there needs to be enterprise-class management. Agere Systems’ Orinoco Wireless LAN Manager was intended to be such a management solution.

However, we found Orinoco WLAN Manager to be only an incremental improvement over the free software that comes with each Agere access point. Furthermore, our testing revealed that the product is unstable. Both factors contributed to our score of Reject.

Orinoco WLAN Manager doesn’t provide a global view of wireless network activity, but gives you easy access to information about each wireless access point on your network. For each device, you can view packet statistics to determine how many packets of what type have passed through. You can also see the bridge and address resolution tables, and in a status area you can see alarms and general operating condition (such as whether the access point is turned on).

In the configuration mode WLAN Manager gives you the ability to change the names and IP addresses of devices, and provides various session details such as whether to forward DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) requests. All in all, the software gives you nothing beyond what you get with any other decent access point manager, except that it will manage more than one type of Orinoco access point.

More important, however, were the problems we experienced running the software. During our testing we were able to avoid crashing the application only through great care, and even that didn’t always work.

For example, when switching between the configuration and status screens, we had to close one before opening the other or a crash would result. Sometimes the application crashed anyway.

We also found that when attempting to configure an access point using WLAN Manager, the software so scrambled the firmware on the access point that it was rendered inoperative.

Initially, we tested WLAN Manager on a dual-processor Windows XP Professional workstation. Although an Agere representative assured us that the software worked with Windows XP, XP is not included on the list of supported operating systems. As a result we also tested WLAN Manager on Windows 2000 and Windows NT. The problems remained. In fact, during the course of many calls to Agere, one of the engineers we spoke with admitted that he’d also been having problems with the software crashing.

Orinoco WLAN Manager only works with Agere Systems’ wireless products or those made from Agere components. Even though the software uses SNMP to perform its management tasks, it won’t recognize other SNMP-capable access points. In addition, WLAN Manager is scalable only to a limited extent. You can either choose to manage as many as 50 access points, or you can pay twice as much for more access points.

And then there’s the security issue. WLAN Manager depends on SNMP for management access. Recent research has demonstrated that there’s a significant risk involved with using SNMP on any network. Using that protocol on a network device exposed to the outside world dramatically increases that risk. (For more information, see the highly regarded SANS Institute’s Top 20 list at .) Unless you add strong passwords and encryption to your access points, someone sitting in the company parking lot could take over an access point and gain access to your entire network.

Although Agere apparently makes good access points, WLAN Manager requires that you use only those products if you plan to use the management software. Any access points from other vendors that you might have installed already would have to go unmanaged, or at least be managed by different software.

The result is that it’s hard to make a strong case for Agere’s Orinoco Wireless LAN Manager. The product is unstable, proprietary, and expensive, and it has the potential to disrupt your wireless infrastructure and increase your security risks.

Agere also provides a free management solution with its access points, and although these solutions (which vary depending on the type of access point) are more limited, they at least work.

If Agere is able to fix the problems that result in the product’s instability and its inadvertent disabling of access points, WLAN Manager would be a product worth considering. But even so, you’d need to have a homogeneous network infrastructure to make it really useful. At best, Orinoco WLAN Manager is a minor improvement over the management software included with most other enterprise-class WLAN products. In its current state, it’s not compelling, except perhaps as a reason to look elsewhere.

Source: www.infoworld.com