Access Point Integration
If your lab needs to have both Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) and WLAN clients, then we recommend the following configuration as a best practice. The AP must be a physical hardware to emit radio waves for the WLAN client tests. We recommend that you allocate a free Ethernet port at the server for each AP. For each physical Ethernet interface at the server, create a unique Linux bridge assigning the NIC. Then, assign the individual Linux bridge to a vJunos-switch interface for integration. As your server NIC usually has no PoE option, you need a power supply for the AP.
You can now test any available physical WLAN clients.
You can virtualize the wireless client on your server, which is useful for remote lab access. A VM can be built as a Linux or Windows Wireless client. For the virtual client's Wi-Fi Radio, we recommend using an inexpensive WLAN USB adapter connected to the server with the client VM. Identify the USB ID of the adapter and map it to the VM when starting. The following example shows how to archive this in an Ubuntu KVM libvirtd environment.
# If you have multiple WLAN Clients then you may see more than one adapter to use
# with just one adapter the number is "1"
ADAPTERNO="1"
# we use the lsusb command to retrieve the WLAN adapter
# however sometime the vendor give the adapter a different name
# in this case you may need editing the key-words we search for
ADAPTERSEARCH="WLAN|Wireless|802.11"
lsusb | egrep -i $ADAPTERSEARCH >usbwlan.txt
line=`sed -n $ADAPTERNO'p' usbwlan.txt`
USBBUS=`echo $line | awk '{print $2}'`
USBDEVICE=`echo $line | awk '{print $4}' | sed 's/://g'`
echo 'WLAN Adapter at Bus:'$USBBUS' Device:'$USBDEVICE
# do not proceed if no WLAN adapter was detected
# start the client VM with adding the WLAN adapter as hostdev-device
virt-install -n desktopvm --vcpus=1 -r 2048 \
--hvm --os-variant ubuntu20.04 --cpu host \
--import \
--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/desktopvm.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
--controller usb2 --hostdev $USBBUS.$USBDEVICE \
--graphics vnc,listen=0.0.0.0 –noautoconsoleIf you reboot the server after the client VM is started, the WLAN adapter USB IDs might change.