The Cisco Wireless LAN Controller web interface provides centralized visibility and configuration management for enterprise wireless networks, including connected access points, clients, rogue device detection, and WLAN security settings.
Wireless Controller Web Interface
Now that we have the basic setup all done on our wireless controller, let's take a look at the web interface and get a little familiar.
The first step is we're going to bring up a browser and type in the IP address that we assigned to this wireless controller during the initial setup. So I'm going to do 10.1.10.5, hit enter, and we get our login screen. So I'm going to hit login here and take the credentials that we set up on this device and go ahead and put them in here and sign in. Here we are, we're now logged in.
This initial screen is a dashboard. It just shows some of the highlights of how we have this set up. We are in the monitoring dashboard here, and we see the network summary. Within the network summary we see the number of wireless networks there are, the number of access points, the clients that we have on here. We see access points, rogue access points that are out there, and we see clients that are out there — these are rogue clients. We'll talk more about rogue access points and clients here in a second, but those essentially are access points and clients that are outside of the system entering, interferers like possibly microwaves or other phones or things that could interfere with this.
So this gives us a glimpse. Part of this is the power behind Cisco: you can see that it's already right from the get-go presenting us a lot more information than we would see with just a consumer level product. So we're getting a lot of cool data here, and you're really able to manage your networks through this.
I can click on access points and see that I've already connected an access point to here. I was just testing things out, and we're going to go through the process in a future video of connecting an access point, but I just wanted to make sure that everything was set up correctly. Then, no clients at this point in time; we haven't set up any security. We have a wireless LAN that's out there. In fact, I can click down here and see the wireless networks, and we see that TKS 10 that we have on here. So it is broadcasting out the SSID on there, but we haven't set up the security with it, so we're going to go through that here in a little bit.
Then the performance: we could see the performance of the devices that are on here, the client performance. We don't have any clients, so we can't really see that. And then some best practices that we can go through and make sure we've tuned this for the best practices.
So this is just kind of our monitoring, or I call it a dashboard. This is just a basic look into how this is performing and things that are connected to it.
But if we want to get more advanced and actually do some configuration, we have to click this Advanced button right here. When I go into the advanced, now I see some additional information. First of all, it gets me — I'm still under this monitor tab, so anything that I click on here, I'll be able to see a lot of the similar stats that we saw before, just more in depth. We've got this interface here, and it's showing me that it's port one that's active right now. The other ports are not active, which is what we programmed, so that makes sense that it's set up that way. It's giving us all sorts of information.
Across the top here is your main navigation. So we're in the Monitor, and when we have monitor selected, these are all of the options we have to monitor. I can go to the wireless LAN, and here are the options with the wireless LAN that we have. I can go to controller, and now here are the options, things that I can look at with a controller. I can go to wireless, security, management. I think you get the point there.
So Wireless LANs is going to show us those wireless LANs that we have set up. Controllers are all of the configurations of the controller itself that we can get into and manage. This is the wireless, and so we can go in here and look at all the access points, the radios that are configured. So just a wealth of information, a lot of the configurations that we can do in here. For the CCNA, we don't need to get all that advanced into a lot of this stuff, so we're going to take a look at the highlights in future videos. We're not going to get real in depth into this, but there's some pretty cool stuff in here that we could go in and configure and make sure it's tuned for our network. Security if we need to — and we will be setting up some security within here. That's definitely some information you're going to need to know for the CCNA.
The management is some management traffic that we can set up and configure on here. Commands, if there are certain commands we want to load on here — for instance, we can do the reset to factory or reboot, or we can upload a file to it. Then we've got Help and Feedback.
Once we make our configuration changes, then we would want to hit save configuration to make the configuration save to the startup config, so that way we don't lose the information with the restart.
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