I have too many WLANs. I mean, don’t we all? Due to…”legacy”…I have a “Corp” WLAN, a guest WLAN, and then 3 others. Well, the other day I wanted to do something simple: I had a group of APs, 6 in total, that I wanted to NOT broadcast those other WLANs. It wasn’t super intuitive to me how to do this in Mist so I did what I usually do: I bugged Wes and here’s what I learned.
The correct way to do what I wanted to do was with a Label. Now here is where you have your first decision point: Do you need a label at the Site level or the Organization level? In my case at work I was applying this label to an Org level template, and so I needed to have an Org level Label. In the examples below I’m doing this with a Site level WLAN, so I need a Site level Label. The good news is that how you create the label is identical, it’s just a matter of where you do it.
So step 1: go to Site and click Labels:
Now you’ll see all the labels you have. In my home network I’ve named a bunch of clients, so those all show up here.
(Yes, I named my Roomba Dolores. As in Dolores Abernathy from Westworld.)
Anyway, next you click “Add Label” up in the corner. You might miss it, so I put a red box around it. Next you’re going to want to make your label. It looks like this:
So we need a Label Name, obviously. And this label is of type Access Point. But what’s really important is that you click the radio button next to NOT. Because this label represents the APs we want to EXCLUDE from a WLAN. After you select the NOT radio button then in the box under Label Values click the plus sign and you should see a list of your APs. (I have 4 APs at home.) In this example I picked two of them.
So after that click “Create”. It’ll take you back to your list of labels and you should see your new label now:
So now navigate to the config for the WLAN you want to exclude from your labeled APs.
Go over (or down) to “Apply to Access Points” and click “AP Labels”. Click on the plus sign and select your newly created Label:
And now once you’ve done that and the label is applied the “Save” button should turn blue so click that.
And that’s all there is to it. Now that I’ve done it once it seems simple, but at first I couldn’t quite figure out how it all sorted out. Thanks to Wes I did and so hopefully this will help someone else so that we all don’t bug Wes.