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Cisco 2700 series location appliances are servers that enhance the high-accuracy built-in Cisco WCS location abilities by computing, collecting, and storing historical location data for up to 1,500 laptop clients, palmtop clients, VoIP telephone clients, Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID) asset tags, rogue access points, and rogue access point clients.
A location server acts as a server to one or more Cisco WCS servers, collecting, storing, and passing on data from its associated Cisco wireless LAN controllers.
You can configure and operate location servers using the Cisco WCS, which has an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). Before you can use the GUI, however, you must perform an initial configuration using a CLI console session as described in the Quick Start Guide: Cisco 2700 Series Location Appliance.
The following sections describe the main topics covered in this guide:
•"Display of Location Data" section
•"Maintenance Operations" section
•"WCS and Location Server Synchronization" section
•"Monitoring Capability" section
•"Configuration and Administration" section
•"Compatibility Matrix" section
After it is configured, each location server communicates directly with the Cisco wireless LAN controllers to which it was assigned to collect operator-defined location data. You can then use the associated Cisco WCS server to communicate with each location server to transfer and display selected data.
You can configure location appliances to collect data for Cisco Wireless LAN Solution clients, rogue access points, rogue clients, mobile stations, and RFID asset tags at separate intervals which you define.
Location servers provide the functionality for sending event notifications to registered listeners over the following transport mechanisms:
•Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
•Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail
•Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
•SysLog
Note WCS can act as a listener receiving event notifications over SNMP.
Without event notification, Cisco WCS and third-party applications will need to periodically request location information from location servers. (Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1 Pull Communication Model
The pull communication model, however, is not suitable for applications that require more real-time updates to location information. For these applications, you can configure location servers to send event notifications (push) when certain conditions are met as soon as possible to the registered listeners (Figure 1-2).
Figure 1-2 Push Communication Model
You can use Cisco WCS to back up the location server to a predefined FTP folder on any Cisco WCS server at defined intervals. You can also restore the location server data from that Cisco WCS Server. Other location server maintenance operations that you can perform include downloading new application code to all associated location server from any Cisco WCS server, defragmenting the Cisco WCS database, restarting location servers, and clearing location server configurations.
To maintain accurate location information, you can use Cisco WCS to configure location servers so that they are synchronized with network design, event group, and controller elements. Cisco WCS provides you with two ways to synchronize these elements and locations servers: manual and automatic (auto-sync).
You can use Cisco WCS to monitor alarms and events generated by location servers. You can also download log files and view location server status information.
You use Cisco WCS to perform different configuration and administrative tasks, including adding and removing location servers, configuring location server properties, and managing users and groups.
Table 1-1 describes compatibility between WCS and location server versions.
|
|
|
|
---|---|---|---|
WCS 3.0 |
Supported |
Supported1 |
Not supported |
WCS 3.1 |
Supported2 |
Supported |
Supported from WCS 3.1.35.0 onwards3 |
WCS 3.2 |
Supported2 |
Supported3 |
Supported |
1 Certain antenna attributes are ignored by WCS 2 Certain antenna attributes are ignored by the location server 3 Asynchronous notification features are ignored by the location server |