Verifying the Wired Hop

[RumorConsumer]

Related to my previous thread here: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Wireless-LAN/The-Wired-Hop/m-p/58937#M8877

does anybody have thoughts on how to verify a packet is going wired from one of the remote APs versus wireless?

So i have my main gateway called Main House which is a Mr84 w omnis.

the wireless bridge is made between Main House and another roof mounted Mr74 AP 80 yards away called Yoga House which has omnis on top and a Sector on the 5ghz aimed right at the main house. Direct line of sight, highly rural so no interference.

Yoga house is connected to a POE+ netgear switch which in turn is connected/wired to

- an MR52 inside the house which cannot see anything else wirelessly and consistently reports the same mbit mesh

speed as the Yoga house Ap as expected per the article i cite in the previous thread.

-another Mr74 (yurt booster) with sectors on both bands aimed away from main house. However, the sectors are barely able to pick up main house and display a mesh connection of like 5mbit instead of the double indented expected behavior that i get with the indoor mr52. In RF pane for the yurt booster it does know it’s wired but I’m suspicious and want to verify that in fact it is using its wired hop for its main uplink.

thoughts?

[BlakeRichardson]

@RumorConsumer  what sort of switch is the yurt booster plugged into, if its a Meraki switch can you run a packet capture on the port the device is plugged into and see.

If its another brand I would setup a port mirror on the port the device is using and check that way. 

I don;t want to assume to know or don't know what port mirroring is so here is a wikipedia article just in case. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_mirroring

[RumorConsumer]

 Yes I have no clue what it is but I will check it out.

They're on a dumb Netgear 8 port POE+ switch. Great device but not sure it does all that. Anything simpler? Like if I had a Macbook Pro on the Yurt Booster and one on the Main house could I somehow verify the route of data with an app that had a client/server type thing? 

[BlakeRichardson]

Actually a packet capture wont help you as it only captures the conversation between two end points not that path it takes.

[BlakeRichardson]

Could you dial back its RF power output so that it potentially break its MESH connection and then run the same test standing near the access point to so if it improves?