Fixing Home Wireless Problems with Inssider

When friends ask me to help troubleshoot their network problems, I never seem to have my laptop much, much less any powerful tools that can actually help me easily diagnose what the problem is. Lately, however, I’ve found myself relying on inssider (from the makers of the wispy) for a quick and dirty view of what their signal looks like in their house.

Insidder helps identify sketchy coverage (e.g. areas below -80 dbm RSSI). Its real time RSSI graph of the various SSIDs helps wrangle the 802.11 channel craziness by finding which channels are being tied up on neighboring SSIDs. Sometimes, if I have adequate coverage in an area and a laptop often jumps on a neighbor’s stronger SSID too soon, I might sometimes drill down into their driver and tweak the roaming aggressiveness. And for when you never want to roam to a neighboring AP using your SSID, I have begun started hardcoding MAC addresses to the actual SSID, which you can do in Linux as well as Intel PROset/Wireless program for Windows (haven’t done it in OS X yet).

I was talking with one of the other SEs in my company about the current state of wireless resembles the early days of ethernet (at least, based on what others have told me). Everything is a sort of voodoo, and finding good, simple to read resources / tutorials is not yet easy. In order to figure out the underlying protocol, you often have to sort through gobbledygook or hype, rather than going to a few key easy-to-read sources. As wifi gains momentum (particularly over wimax), this will change, I think. But until then, actually understanding the alphabet soup that makes a wireless protocol and its relation to applications (e.g. how collision avoidance affects VoIP) might be a little murky.