Discovering why some wireless clients are showing as wired

aott
Conversationalist

Discovering why some wireless clients are showing as wired

Hello,

 

I'm curious about why some wireless clients show up as wired and other ones don't. 

 

On my Clients list, if I filter for clients connected to an SSID, it's a smaller subset of clients than if I display *all* clients and filter by public VLAN. There are always many mobile devices, etc. that show up as a wired client. This confusion is making it difficult to track public wireless usage over time. I have noticed that the wireless clients that show up as wired are usually only 802.11b at 20 MHz and do not show a recent SSID, making them very difficult to distinguish from wired clients except when the name or OS gives them away as mobile devices. How could I identify and track those easier, for 1) tracking all public wireless clients over time, and 2) evaluating how many old devices keep connecting?

 

Thank you.

4 REPLIES 4
PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

>There are always many mobile devices, etc. that show up as a wired client.

 

This can happen when someone pairs a mobile device (USB, Bluetooth) to a computer that has a wired connection and then uses that connection to access the Internet.

nbv
Here to help

This occurs at my workplace when we have somebody come in with a laptop and they plug it into a dock with a network cable. The computer will be associated to two clients - wireless and wired - and they will have the same name. The current way I filter these when searching for multiple clients is to just sort by Online/Offline status. It doesn't seem like the best way to do that though so if there's other suggestions, I would be willing to listen.

Marcu
New here

i have same problem

redsector
Head in the Cloud

We have got an AD rule to switch off the WiFi hardware on the laptop when it´s connected to LAN. Then it´s shown only once in the client list.

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