Having a real bad time with WM, would love some tips

Hi, first let me to introduce myself. I work for a small to medium WISP in Brasil, we are planning for some upgrade in our network and we got stucked with Prizm because of it’s license limit, so we bought WM, that’s when our nightmare begun.

No matter how many times I try, I always end getting all kind of errors while trying to put WM + BAM to work.

First we got some authentication failed while trying to open BAM from elements context-menu. I couldn’t even refresh BAM privileges without getting a eternal loading that drove me crazy a bunch of time.

Then we got some help from Cambium tech support and BAM worked just fine, but in the morning after, when I powered up the server for testing purposes the entire WM+BAM world crashed again and now the whole WM is not working, I’m getting WM license server error and even the troubleshoot described in WM documentation (the lic file RENAME thing) wasn’t enough.

I’m kinda losing hope in make this WM + BAM work here, so I here I am.

Anyone here using WM 4.0 + BAM in a Windows Server 2008 R2? How was installation? The WM documentation provided could help in deploying the server at all?

Anyone using CentOS, how installation works with Linux?

WM works by itself using the installation procedure described in documentation, but BAM just don’t give me any chances of happiness.

BTW, I’m sorry about my bad English, but I figured out that would be better ask for help here instead of using PT-BR subforum.

We investigated WM + BAM early on but it just looked like a colossal headache (plus licenses are twice the cost). Reading your post I’m glad we didn’t even attempt it.

What software version is your network running? We moved to 11.2 to take advantage of RADIUS AAA. I’m very happy with the RADIUS side (not so happy with WM)

salad wrote:
We investigated WM + BAM early on but it just looked like a colossal headache (plus licenses are twice the cost). Reading your post I'm glad we didn't even attempt it.

What software version is your network running? We moved to 11.2 to take advantage of RADIUS AAA. I'm very happy with the RADIUS side (not so happy with WM)


At the moment most of our gear is using 9.5, we got some new gear running newer software, but only a few.

WM + BAM is a nightmare. When BAM worked License Manager stopped, I have already spent countless hours trying to deploy this server. Almost trying Linux next time, only waiting for a last support ticket attempt.

It's kinda sad because we have a enormous potential customers, but we are limited only by Prism licenses, otherwise we would be glad to continue using the good old Prism.

How many nodes are you talking about? In RADIUS AAA you don’t need to license anything - only WM to “manage” the nodes (not required for auth)

salad wrote:
How many nodes are you talking about? In RADIUS AAA you don't need to license anything - only WM to "manage" the nodes (not required for auth)


Our old license was for 26 elements (Prism), APs and PTPs, our new problematic license is for 50 elements (WM), but BAM is causing too much pain, I'm considering to use Radius and spend time in a more productive way other than turn my hair to gray.

Well hopefully your network isn’t too large then if you only have 26 APs. The past couple of months I’ve converted to RADIUS on 70 APs and ~800 SMs. The biggest pain in the neck was customers turning their SMs off when they weren’t using them, which makes upgrading to 11.2 and applying new settings rather difficult.

For this process we still had our Prizm server running. I hope to turn it off at the end of the month. Cambium support (Motorola at the time) had no problem with us doing this to facilitate our migration

salad wrote:
Well hopefully your network isn't too large then if you only have 26 APs. The past couple of months I've converted to RADIUS on 70 APs and ~800 SMs. The biggest pain in the neck was customers turning their SMs off when they weren't using them, which makes upgrading to 11.2 and applying new settings rather difficult.

For this process we still had our Prizm server running. I hope to turn it off at the end of the month. Cambium support (Motorola at the time) had no problem with us doing this to facilitate our migration


I'm thinking about use radius by now, today will be my last attempt with cambium support team.
What radius solution are you using? Which plataform Windows or Linux?

We’re using FreeRADIUS with MySQL back end on Debian 6. If you decide to go that route I’d be happy to post some of the necessary configuration in this thread.

You may also want to give a good look at Cambium’s own WISP Toolbox: http://www.cambiumtools.com/index.php?o … 41&lang=en

Unfortunately by the time Cambium announced that I was already mostly done my own version in-house. Also the WISP Toolbox doesn’t have integrated IP Management, so you’d need to do static assignment or DHCP. One of the nice features with 11.2 is support for IP addressing as a RADIUS attribute, so I actually store all of that information in a database.

salad wrote:
We're using FreeRADIUS with MySQL back end on Debian 6. If you decide to go that route I'd be happy to post some of the necessary configuration in this thread.

You may also want to give a good look at Cambium's own WISP Toolbox: http://www.cambiumtools.com/index.php?o ... 41&lang=en

Unfortunately by the time Cambium announced that I was already mostly done my own version in-house. Also the WISP Toolbox doesn't have integrated IP Management, so you'd need to do static assignment or DHCP. One of the nice features with 11.2 is support for IP addressing as a RADIUS attribute, so I actually store all of that information in a database.


I'm gonna take a look at this Cambium WISP Tools first, then I'm gonna read more about a FreeRADIUS + daloRADIUS implementation that seems a nice approach too, just in case.

Thank you for all these great tips salad, this weekend I'm gonna play with these two options in my VM lab.

No problem. Motorola/Cambium really screwed up on this one, we went from a really nice (if slow) provisioning and management system to “Sorry, you’re own your own” for provisioning, and a glorified mapping program that doesn’t scale anywhere near as well :frowning:

(Compare ~1000 nodes in Prizm with 2 CPUs and 2 GB RAM to now 3 servers: standalone RADIUS server, standalone DB server with 4 GB RAM and 2 CPUs, and standalone app server with 6 GB RAM and 4 CPUs)

We jumped over to WM from Prizm with the upgrade incentive but we’ve invested thousands of dollars in labor to make it behave and making up for the deficiencies (and bugs).

salad wrote:
No problem. Motorola/Cambium really screwed up on this one, we went from a really nice (if slow) provisioning and management system to "Sorry, you're own your own" for provisioning, and a glorified mapping program that doesn't scale anywhere near as well :(

(Compare ~1000 nodes in Prizm with 2 CPUs and 2 GB RAM to now 3 servers: standalone RADIUS server, standalone DB server with 4 GB RAM and 2 CPUs, and standalone app server with 6 GB RAM and 4 CPUs)

We jumped over to WM from Prizm with the upgrade incentive but we've invested thousands of dollars in labor to make it behave and making up for the deficiencies (and bugs).


That's really a step forward for Cambium customers, increasing too much cost while lowering the benefit ratio. I'm thinking how to explain all this situation to my boss, he knows barely nothing about TI, but love to see things workings with low cost.

Oh my... I must have done something really bad in other life...

Hey salad, thanks for everything. If I choose for the RADIUS path I will accept the help you offered.
Have a nice day my friend.

I had the same Problems…the Solutions is Daloradius for AAA and WM for NMS.

Cambium had make a very bad job with WM and BAM.

I want to sell my Prizm with 90 nodes…

Daniel

Reading this thread makes me real happy we don’t use either Radius or WM.

smwtech wrote:
Reading this thread makes me real happy we don't use either Radius or WM.


Nah. The RADIUS works fantastically. I really like handing out IP addresses as a RADIUS attribute versus static or DHCP

Hi salad,

do you use the system in bridge or Nat mode?

Do you need Equipment? We must close big network´s, a big Provider is here with LTE…bad bad…

Platzhirsch wrote:
Hi salad,

do you use the system in bridge or Nat mode?

Do you need Equipment? We must close big network´s, a big Provider is here with LTE..bad bad..


We run all of our gear in bridge mode and carry PPPoE back to the central office. And we have plenty of equipment, but thanks

okay like me…thanks

Hi Salad,
How can you this?
"I really like handing out IP addresses as a RADIUS attribute versus static or DHCP"
I use freeradius for Bandwith, burts, high priority control, but how can i assign a IP address to them?

thanks

If you have 11.2 you can pass the following:

Motorola-Canopy-Gateway
Framed-IP-Netmask
Framed-IP-Address

I love it since there’s no DHCP mess to work with and the SMs keep their 169.254.1.1 address so techs can get into them still.