Signal strength from Cisco 350 Bridge from perl script?

What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.

Has anyone done this?

Currently, I'm experimenting with the 350's telnet interface, but it
looks to be a bit messy to get it to work.

Any help/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!

"tomviolin" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com:

> What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
> a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
> strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.
>
> Has anyone done this?
>
> Currently, I'm experimenting with the 350's telnet interface, but it
> looks to be a bit messy to get it to work.
>
> Any help/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!
>
>

You might want to try comp.programming there are perl people there who
might be able to help.

Duane

On 23 Apr 2005 10:54:12 -0700, "tomviolin"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
>a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
>strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.
>
>Has anyone done this?

Yes, but with a Aironet 340, not a 350. Signal strength and other
data is available via SNMP. The periodic data logging and graphing is
done with either MRTG or RRDTOOL. See:
| http://www.mrtg.org
| http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/
Polling rate is every 5 minutes. Usually one uses MRTG and RRDTool to
graph network traffic. Anything available via SNMP (as an integer)
can be graphed. Signal strength and S/N ratio is in there somewhere.
You'll need the various MIB databases for the 350 to determine the
proper OID's. They're on the Cisco web pile at:
| ftp://ftp-sj.cisco.com/pub/mibs/supp...pportlist.html

>Currently, I'm experimenting with the 350's telnet interface, but it
>looks to be a bit messy to get it to work.
>
>Any help/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm not sure what you mean by "link test" and how you plan to record
the data. If link test is a simple ping test to see if the link is
alive, then something like Big Brother, WhatsUP, Nagios, PingProbe or
other management tool that's designed to check if network servers are
up should work as well for wireless.


--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558

tomviolin wrote:
> What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
> a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
> strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.
>
> Has anyone done this?
>
> Currently, I'm experimenting with the 350's telnet interface, but it
> looks to be a bit messy to get it to work.
>
> Any help/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!


You might try

http://search.cpan.org/~jrogers/Net-.../Net/Telnet.pm

or

http://search.cpan.org/~joshua/Net-T...-1.10/Cisco.pm

or

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=cisco&mode=all



John

"tomviolin" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
> a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
> strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.
>
> Has anyone done this?
>
> Currently, I'm experimenting with the 350's telnet interface, but it
> looks to be a bit messy to get it to work.
>
> Any help/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!
>

Tom,

I haven't worked with the Aironet devices yet (we will be getting in some
1100 series in a few months) but I assume that they use IOS like most other
Cisco devices. If so I may have a PERL script for you. I wrote it as an
interface for Net::Telnet::Cisco and Net::SSH::Perl. It has the ability to
connect to any IOS device via telnet or SSH and run a series of commands. I
have used it to make updates to over 500 devices. It outputs the results of
the command to a text file, which could easily be formatted to HTML or XML.
If your interested, let me know. It should be uploaded to CPAN soon for all
to see, touch, feel, and poke fun at.. :-)

-Richard

Hi Tom,

Take a look at the Cisco-Centric Open Source (COSI).
http://cosi-nms.sourceforge.net/
There are quite a few snmp/perl/expect scipts and tools you might find
useful.
I'll second most tool thats been mentioned in this post, thanks to Open
Source all the way!!!

PS. Richard, I am interested in your script if you dont mind me
asking?!

Regards,
Rob

"RobO" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> Hi Tom,
>
> Take a look at the Cisco-Centric Open Source (COSI).
> http://cosi-nms.sourceforge.net/
> There are quite a few snmp/perl/expect scipts and tools you might find
> useful.
> I'll second most tool thats been mentioned in this post, thanks to Open
> Source all the way!!!
>
> PS. Richard, I am interested in your script if you dont mind me
> asking?!
>
> Regards,
> Rob
>

I replied to your hotmail account with a copy of the script!

-Richard

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:16:04 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>On 23 Apr 2005 10:54:12 -0700, "tomviolin"
><(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>>What I would like to do is create a Perl script to periodically perform
>>a link test on a Cisco 350 bridge and record the current signal
>>strength. I'm doing this as part of a site survey.

Duh... Extracted from my own MRTG install instructions is this script
that will return the uptime from a router. I use it for testing SNMP.
Change the host name to the Cisco router, the community name, and the
OID to whatever is the OID for signal strength.

You'll need to get BER.PM and SNMP_SESSION.PM from either the MRTG
distribution, or the latest from:
http://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/snmp/perl/dist/


use BER;
use SNMP_Session;
# Return the uptime of the localhost to test SNMP
$host = "localhost";
$community = "public";
$oid = encode_oid(1,3,6,1,2,1,1,3,0); # Uptime
$session = SNMP_Session->open ($host, $community, 161)
|| die "Can't open SNMP session to localhost";
$session->get_request_response ($oid);
($bindings) = $session->decode_get_response ($session->{pdu_buffer});
($binding,$bindings) = &decode_sequence ($bindings);
($oid,$value) = &decode_by_template ($binding, "%O%@");
print &pretty_print($oid)," => ", &pretty_print ($value), "\n";


--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558