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Well my friends, meshing lives...right here in the CWNP Lab in fact.

Mike Graham (CWNA, CWSP) came out to the lab today from FireTide, threw the 3.5.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 code :-) onto three boxes, rebooted, and WHAMO - they came up, meshed, and worked flawlessly the whole time we were testing and playing. In my multipath-rich environment, they were getting about 15 Mbps of throughput across the mesh (configured for ch60). I think it would've been higher, but we discovered well after doing all of our throughput testing that the radios were at full power and overdriving the snot out of each other (since they were sitting on the same table). It's likely that more throughput can be had with appropriate power settings and spacing of the units. Never a glitch even while upgrading code, adding FireTide's new Autonomous APs, etc, etc. I was impressed. Previous versions of hardware and code left me skeptical, but now I'm happy with these units.

The APs are brand new and have first generation code. Everything seems to work on them (when you browse into the box for configuration), but we did notice some little things like the fact that while a mesh node will recognize the AP as soon as it's plugged in, you can't configure it from HotView (FireTide's WNMS) until you've prepped the AP manually (browse to it on the pre-configured IP, set a new IP, set an SSID, security parameters, etc). Once an AP is prepped, the mesh finds it in a snap, let's you configure it through HotView, and the whole 9 yards. Not a HUGELY feature rich AP, but it has all of the basics and then some more. WPA2 security, up to 16 virtual WLANs, etc - not bad.

Mike showed me some SLICK stuff like using them as gateways, using ethernet as part of the mesh, and much more. I especially like the fact that you could (if you were really wanting to spend some money), make a mesh rogue using 4.9 GHz (undetectable by most of today's protocol analyzers and WIPS) frequencies and several mesh units. That way, if someone found your rogue and removed it, the remaining mesh nodes would self-heal and your rogue would still be in place. :-) holy cow. Something else that's really cool is that you can build Ethernet meshes with this same gear....how cool is that?

All in all, a great day. I learned a ton, I was impressed by the gear, and Mike Graham was a brilliant as ever. FireTide's lucky to have that guy.
What can I say...I'm now a fan of mesh networking....oh, and don't expect to see anything out of the 802.11s TG any time in the near future...

Devinator