The CMM Micro are shit! We are going to eliminate all of them soon. Reasons:
1. The mac address table is to small. On the clusters of 6 APs with ~500 SMs there is a traffic form the CMM to the Ethernet side of the APs which sometimes is up to 3-4 megs. This traffic is dropped on the radio interface, but so much discards can overload the AP.
2. Management is problem. When there is big problem the CMM blocks and is hard to isolate from which AP the problem comes. Stimulating DOS also shuts down the CMM.
3. The VLAN capabilities doesn’t work. You can’t separate the CMM in two different switches so you can feed two times 3 APs with two BH.
Solution is to use proper switch and all the AP to be connected in separate port. There are used 100 megs Cisco Catalyst on eBay for $300 which are perfect for Canopy.
I agree. The CMMmicro is the Achilles Heel of the entire Canopy network.
What do you do for timing when you use the Cisco switch?
We have developed solution similar to the SyncInjector from Packet Flux, but with 24 ports.
We have a patch panel, all the APs and BHs goes there. Behind them is electronics which has 24V in ports 1-20. We run one cable from the CMM into this board, we get the Sync from there and we redistribute it to all the ports. Patch panel is connected with the switch with the four wires needed for Ethernet.
The plan for future development is to use the GPS board from the CMM and develop complete solution.