RUCKCast #74: RWG - The New Dog On The Block

In our latest episode, the Johns outnumber the Jims, as John Murphy joins our hosts to dig more into the RUCKUS WAN Gateway. John (Murphy!) first presented on this at the recently concluded Mobility Field Day. You can see his presentation in the link below.

https://techfieldday.com/video/ruckus-wan-gateway-with-john-murphy/

Follow this link to learn more about the RUCKUS WAN Gateway https://www.ruckusnetworks.com/products/edge/

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

Transcript

RUCKcast #74 – RWG the new dog on the block

John Deegan: And let's get this show on the road.

Good afternoon, Mr. Palmer. How are you, sir? 

Jim Palmer: Not bad, John. How are you doing? 

John Deegan: I'm not too bad. It's a Friday afternoon, even though I know that always drives you nuts with the time shift and stuff like that. Officially, this is a Thursday morning. This will be Thursday morning, June 20. I can't do math 29th when this goes.

29th. There you go. I, I can't count. Yeah. But yeah, no, it's good. It's, you know, I'm still here. I, my, I had a, a bad sub joke I'm not gonna make, ah, but no, I'm good. I'm good. You know. How are you? 

Jim Palmer: Not bad. You know, we're finally getting, it's like today's gonna be a good day and we, we've knocked off all the storms, so, Hopefully back to summertime since it is now the end of June.

It's June 29th, which means technically we are now like six weeks out of Mobility Field Day 9, so. 

John Deegan: That is true. It feels like it was just yesterday. But it wasn't. Time does fly. I feel like it flies when I get older. But 

Jim Palmer: why does it feel like it was just yesterday for you? You didn't have any do and watched?

John Deegan: It just flew. Well, I didn't even, I didn't even watch. No, it's just, it, it just feels like we were talking about it just yesterday. I mean, it was probably a couple episodes ago at this point, but there's a segue there. I think that you're just leaving out there and I'm gonna let you take that one. 

Jim Palmer: Fine.

I'll, I'll clean up my mess. All right. So the reason why I brought up Mobility Field Day 9 is, so we had a few episodes ago we had Rajiv on, and he was talking about Cloud RRM. Well, cloud RM was not the only thing that we announced at Mobility Field Day 9, in addition to the AP that I announced that I then had to quickly rescind.

We also brought up another product that is, that is fairly new and that one was called the RWG. And so I thought to continue our, you know, sort of our, Hey, let's talk to people that were at Mobility Field Day and do a little bit more of a conversation about it that I would bring on the guy who did that presentation.

And his name is John Murphy. So John, welcome to the podcast. 

John Murphy: Hey guys. Thanks for having me. John Murphy here. It's gonna be fun with two Johns, but, I'm the one that's a principal systems engineer and 

John Deegan: he's the smart guy. 

John Murphy: I, I don't know about that. You know, basically I bring the specifications from the, customers to the engineers.

You know, I'm a people person. You could, you could say that. But basically I work with, our product managers and our customers and partners. And I, I, I'm an overlay of resource, so, you know, people tend to bring, you know, more complex things to me and I get involved in new features and, and stuff like that.

So it's fun. 

Jim Palmer: So I got a, I got a problem with that. Cause if you're the one that brings the requirements from the customers to the engineers, I no longer have a job. So now I got, now I gotta, hopefully my boss. So, all right, so we had last week, we had my, or two weeks ago we had my boss on. So he's probably not listening to this one cuz he doesn't care anymore.

He already, he already got his, his shot of fame and glory and so, So hopefully he's not listening as I try to go, Hey, I gotta figure out what do I do now that John Murphy, not John Deagan, John Murphy has stolen my job. So thank you for that. 

Yeah, no worries Jim. 

John Murphy: You know, there sometimes can be a pretty big gap between how customers see the world and how engineers see the world.

So I think there's room for both of us there. 

Jim Palmer: You, you say that even though we've met, which I appreciate, so,

John Deegan: oh, well. All right. Now, now that we've gotten kind of just given Jim a, a, a a, a heart attack because he is got no more job here, try to walk him off a ledge on this Thursday morning. Anyways. 

Jim Palmer: It's not Thursday. 

John Deegan: I, I just told you Thursday morning. You just told me it was so wait, 

Jim Palmer: what? 

John Murphy: See, 

John Deegan: gotcha. Alright.

Jim Palmer: I can drink at 8:00 AM right? 

John Deegan: Yeah, sure. If only was, well, it's 8:00 AM somewhere.

Anyways, this went off the rails really fast. We didn't even get into the question. 

Jim Palmer: Oh, my has gotta be a record, 

John Deegan: so let's call. 

Jim Palmer: Thanks. 

John Deegan: This is what happens when you have two Johns. I wonder if it would be the same if we had two Jim's. 

Food for thought. We'll have to, 

John Murphy: There can only be one Jim. That's not a concern.

Jim Palmer: There's a, there's a whole story behind that. We won't go into that. But anyway. 

John Deegan: So let's, let's ask Mr. Murphy some questions about RWG so we can, we can educate our audience, 

Jim Palmer: And us. 

John Deegan: Well, I was gonna say he's the smart guy. That's why we have him on. So you want me to kick this one off, Mr. Palmer, or do you want me to, 

Jim Palmer: Yeah. Why don't, why don't you go for it since I guess technically you and him are similar. 

John Deegan: Well, similar cuz we both share a name. That's about it. He's smart. 

Jim Palmer: Okay. 

John Deegan: I'm just, I'm just an SE. 

Jim Palmer: Okay. 

John Deegan: But, so, alright, we'll we'll start off. We've got the nice questions queued up. Jim, thank you for making me look smarter.

So. Right off the bat, we've got, you know, we've got Wi-Fi and networking. We've got a ton of acronyms and alphabet soup, as if they didn't have enough already, we have to introduce another one. So give us like the, the elevator pitch if you will. What is RWG? 

John Murphy: Yeah, so officially RWG stands for the RUCKUS WAN and Gateway.

And basically, you know, the concept here is we're known for Wi-Fi and switching, you know, along with the software that, that manages that and provides analytics. But every network, you know, well, not every network, but primarily most networks connect to the internet, cuz that's where most of the stuff you wanna access is, right?

So every network needs some kind of device. To make that connection and that does things like routing and, and NAT, and you know, there can be some security functions there as well. And that, and that's kind of what RUCKUS Wan Gateway is, or RWG, you know, but RWG, you know, if you wanted to be creative, you could, you could make it stand for other stuff too, if you prefer.

I mean, you could call it the Remote Worker Gateway cuz there's VPN functionality in there. You could call it the Realtime Workload Gateway because it's got a hypervisor and you can run workloads and service chain, you could call it the Repeatable WAN Gateway cuz it's all templatable based off of YAML, and we have a thing called Pack Manager, which you can use to push out configurations across like, you know, hundreds of these things if you wanna have repeatable configured all your sites.

So it would, it would totally blow out the time you have for the podcast to go into all the features, which is why, you know, it's not the right place to do that. But basically it's the, it's the gateway that you place at the edge of your network to connect it to the internet. 

Jim Palmer: And I, you know, I was watching the, Your presentation at Mobility Field Day 9.

Again, I was actually in the room at the back of the room when you gave it, and I was watching it again this morning just to try to remind myself, what happened. Cause I've slept since then. And I, and I got to the one slide where you ended up, you, you popped up like all the different like features that were, you know, contained within the RUCKUS WAN Gateway.

And I have to say, I think even just listing, just reading off all of those would probably take up like half of our time just to read it off. So it was, it really kind of, you know, I guess brought me back into what it, the possibilities really are just based on how many things were listed on that one slide.

So it, it was sort of impressive at, at all the different things. And I commend you for coming up with all kinds of different things to call the or to, to use RWG on. But let's go into the, I'm gonna bring up another buzzword or another initialism of SD WAN. And you were talking about like the Remote Worker Gateway and, and, stuff like that.

Is, is, is that concept Remote Worker Gateway, is that similar to what, you know, people would talk about with SD WAN or are we talking about, is it something different? I don't know. I'm. 

John Murphy: Sure. There's, there's some overlap in, in kind of those technologies, right? So SD WAN n you know, stands for software defined Wide Area Network.

And, and basically what it is, is if you think back, you know, we had this concept of SDN or software defined networking, which was kind of abstracting the control plane from the data plane and having, you know, the ability to have like a centralized controller that could configure the data path through your network, right?

So if we apply that. Idea of software defined networking to the WAN in then it looks like having some kind of, you know, policy where you can control how your traffic routes without having to rely on any specific physical transport mechanisms. So, you know, you might have, you know, lease lines, MPLS connections, you know, LTE, whatever it might be.

Commodity internet connections, cable modems. So the, the ability to. Steer traffic for applications, you know where it needs to go based on which path makes the right sense for that application is kind of the fundamental idea behind SD WAN. And typically how you see this implemented is usually it's an overlay of VPN tunnels.

That then traffic can be steered into. So you, you know, you can take any internet connection that, that, you know, may not be trusted. Like you, you may trust your service provider to deliver your traffic over a lease line without looking at it. And if it's not encrypted, they certainly could, but there's some trust there because that business relationship.

But with SD wan, what you're typically gonna do is build these VPN tunnels and that allows you to use, you know, a variety of different. WAN connections at the site, you know, whatever makes sense. And, and oftentimes you'll have WAN connections that have different characteristics. So you might have like a, a very high speed connection, but maybe the latency's not quite as good on that one.

And then you might have a lower speed connection with, with better latency or better jitter. And you have certain types of traffic like voice traffic where latency is very important. There's not a lot of bandwidth there. So it might make sense to push your voice traffic over that, that low latency, low jitter connection that may not have as much bandwidth and push all your other traffic the other way.

That's just one example. But of course you always wanna have redundancy as well. So we give you, give the ability to fail that traffic over to an available link. Should that link that you selected go down. I mean, I think that's basically the, the idea behind SD WAN. 

Jim Palmer: So when you talk about like, Switching over the link because it goes down.

I mean, that, that sounds almost like a load balancer, right? 

John Murphy: Yeah, sure. I mean, there's, there's some similarity in, in how those things work for sure. 

Jim Palmer: I mean, I guess 

John Murphy: We can, and we can infect load balance traffic across multiple links, so, you know, for, for certain types of traffic, you might just, you might not really care which link it takes, right?

We just wanna 

Jim Palmer: Right. 

John Murphy: Push the traffic out. And so one of the options we have with 

RWG is to just load balance across all links. 

Jim Palmer: And I know there's a lot of times people will do a load balance, you know, a across all links, but then, you know, the load fell over traditionally would fall under. Sort of like, hey, if you want to do an automatic failover of one, you know, WAN link to a different one because one goes down thanks to a backhoe chopping fiber, you know, 15 miles away, which is a true story.

So. Yeah, that's, that's fun when you're like, what happened to my link? And then you come to find out that, oh, there was a backhoe 15 miles away that chopped your fiber. But so this, so traditionally that would be in a load balancer, people would tell you, oh, you need that load balancer to do that failover.

And so the RUCKUS WAN Gateway has that ability to where you can program it, I'm 

guessing. To where you can 

John Murphy: Yeah, it does it. It does. And you know, you mentioned that big list of features that R D B G has.

Jim Palmer: Right. 

John Murphy: And you know, it's great that we have all that stuff, but really the magic. Is how all those features are bound together with the policy inside RWG.

So in that same policy where you're determining things like, you know, how that traffic is gonna behave and how it's gonna be queued, how much, how much bandwidth it's gonna have, you know, acls or, or security scans or all, you know, whatever it is you wanna do with that traffic, now you have this additional ability to decide which uplink you want that traffic to go through a as well as what the backup is, should that uplink fail.

So, You know, it's, it's the ability to steer that traffic and provide a failover, but to do it in a way that is integrated with, with all of the other decisions you're making about that traffic. And that's really kind of the fundamental advantage of having all those features in this one platform, which is RWG.

John Deegan: Nice. 

So, It's doing everything right. It's, it slices, it dices, it blends it. Purees does all the good stuff. So I'm, 

Jim Palmer: But wait, John! 

John Deegan: There's more, 

John Murphy: but that's not all. 

Jim Palmer: Sorry. I had, sorry, I had to get my Billy Mays out.

John Deegan: I was waiting for somebody. So I've gotta ask, right, so our, RWG appears to do everything under the sun, right?

So, I mean, do we still need, smart Zone or, or if you're a RUCKUS One customer, do you, do you still need that? Or is this a complimentary thing? Like how does this fit in our. Our stack, if you will. 

John Murphy: Yeah. It's so, it is complimentary, right? You, you're still gonna need Smart Zone or, or RUCKUS one, you know, or even in some cases unleashed, you know, all, all three of those are valid options.

So the, the RWG is gonna give you an additional overlay of automation on top of whatever that management platform is that you've chosen, right? So you still need the Smart Zone or RUCKUS One to control translating your, you know, your configuration of what you want your wireless network to be. You know, or your wired network into the low level commands that the AP needs to understand, right?

So that's the job of Smart Zone or, or RUCKUS One is to have all your, your detailed configuration centralized, and then it pushes that out to all the APs and manages all those, those client sessions, et cetera. So yeah, you definitely need both. But when you add RWG, what it gives you is the ability to then have this automation platform that sits on top.

And you could have, you know, one or more Smart Zones. You could also have, you know, that RUCKUS One connection. You could have Unleashed networks, you could even have third party equipment, and then all that can be managed centrally. And so when I, when I create a, a, a wireless LAN, if I want to, I can create that directly within the RWG.

As an element, as a configuration element. And then that can be instantiated into that smart zone or into that unleashed network or, you know, whatever the other third party network is, you know, and that could be all simultaneously, cuz I might have multiple of those connected. 

John Deegan: Nice. 

Jim Palmer: He you used a really big word and, oh, so now, now I know you're, you're like too good for this, for, for John and I.

You, 

John Deegan: He's class, he's classing up the joint. 

He is classing. 

John Murphy: Lemme know. It was, and I, I promise not to do it again.

Jim Palmer: I was, I was about to say some four letter word anyway. 

John Deegan: It's a family show, Jim. 

John Murphy: Wow. 

Jim Palmer: I know. A family show. I don't even remember what the word was. It was so big. That was like a three, like a three syllable word. Holy crap. Damn that word. No crap. We won't get into the debate of crap. 

John Murphy: I'm not familiar with that acronym.

Guys, can you please, code that for me? Correct? 

Jim Palmer: I don't know. You're the one who comes up with all that stuff. Not, not me. 

John Deegan: No. That's marketing's job. 

Jim Palmer: I will. 

John Murphy: Computational resource analysis protocol. 

John Deegan: Damn, that's, that's pretty good. He wants 

to throw something at me right now. 

Jim Palmer: Let me stretch here. I gotta reach, I gotta get a baseball to reach to New New York.

So, so we're talking about, you were talking about Unleashed, which I, I thought was kind of interesting cause I didn't realize that the, that there was still, I mean, there was that hook at an, at the, at that level, I guess. Cuz when I think of an Unleashed network, I'm not thinking about, you know, somebody that's running, you know, A couple of hundred APs or a thousand APs, cuz well Unleashed can't.

And so it's interesting to me that it, that it's like, oh yeah, we can use it on an Unleashed network. Cuz I didn't think that that was possible. But that's a, I mean, that's a nice little, little thing to learn, but from the, from the larger size, I mean, what are we, are we talking about like, Hey, we can only handle a thousand APs or you know, 1,500.

Is there, is there a top end? 

John Murphy: Yeah. So in terms of the number of APs, it's really gonna be dictated by the controller platform that you connect, right? So we have, and we have those platforms, in, in Smart Zone that can manage up to 30,000 APs in a single cluster, right? So that's, that's a lot. And of course when you go to a cloud model, Then everything just scales horizontally and we can spin up resources on demand and those, those limits kind of go away.

And, you know, there could be some fundamental limit. We haven't found it yet, right? But then you have to think about the resources RWG itself needs, and, and that's gonna depend on the configuration that you have. So, you know, the more analysis and, and, you know, scanning that you're doing of that traffic, you know, that's gonna factor in.

But. We have, we have, resourcing tools that we can help you, you know, decide that and plan what kind of hardware you need to run your RWG. Cuz keep in mind, RWG is delivered as software. So it can either be run as a virtual machine or you can install at bare metal. And, once you scale up to the biggest bare metal server that you can throw an RWG on, then you're, you're not out of headroom because you can cluster and, and we can actually cluster quite massively with RWG.

And, and there's, you know, even just discussing the, the different clustering typologies would, would, would be too much time here. But, but, but you can, you can certainly have, you know, many dozens of nodes in a single cluster and we can, load balance all of that traffic and, and provide redundancy and failover, et cetera.

So, you know, the, if there's a limit there, we haven't found it so far, but, you know, you do have to look at, at, at what the, you know, the number of users that you're gonna have on that network and then calculate the right hardware resources and kind of, kind of plan out the the topology of how you're gonna build that cluster.

Jim Palmer: Okay? So, so when you do, so, all right, so I got a question though. So, earlier on you were talking about a Pack manager to manage multiple ones, but when you cluster. Do you get, like, does each, each server within the cluster, does it have its own like management interface or do you have to use Pack Manager or, or is it, you know, similar like, Hey, when I cluster, vSZs together, or even Smart Zones together, you still only end up with that, you know, you really have that one central management.

When you cluster an RWG, is it, is it, you know, I need a, I need to have one screen open for each one, or how did, how would you manage a cluster of RWGs? 

John Murphy: Yeah, that's a great question, Jim. So the cluster is managed in a single interface. So, so each RWG will have its own IP addressing. But you can go to, you know, different nodes to manage.

Everything gets stored into a database and that data, that database is replicated. So you're gonna wanna replicate that. You know, typically you're gonna wanna have some kind of HA right? So the simplest form two nodes, you'd have a database that that can replicate across both. As you get into a bigger cluster, it can, you know, it can make sense to have.

A few nodes that manage the database and then you, you may have nodes that are just more or less data plane forwarders, and the hardware requirements can be different for those use cases because this, it's, you know, different sorts of things that the hardware has to do for, for managing all the database access versus just pushing packets through.

So, so it can get pretty complex, you know, at, at very large scale. But even at the, the largest scale, you're still just working with like a single web interface and you'll see everything in that single web interface. Now. Now that's for, that's for a cluster, right? And once you get beyond a single cluster, which typically, typically is gonna mean multiple sites, then that's where the Pack Manager comes in.

Jim Palmer: Okay. But in this. So would you put, say, say, say you're an enterprise, sorry, mur, Deagan, I'm hijacking the, our conversation here. 

John Deegan: That's fine. 

Jim Palmer: If you, if you, if you are a, an organization that has like one central corporate office building, right? And you have, then you have multiple offices like throughout the country, would you put, would you have, I.

The RWG, would you have just one at your corporate or is the, help me understand, because I'm having a hard time putting this together in my head. I mean, 

John Murphy: Yeah, Jim, so, so there's different topologies you can deploy with the, the most common way that you would deploy in RWG is to put it onsite, close to the users.

Okay. And then your example of, like a headquarters with branch offices. Yeah, that's actually a really good example of how you would leverage the SD WAN we talked about earlier. So in that case, you'd have, you might have a cluster of RWGs at your main headquarters, and then one or two at each branch.

And you could use the Pack manager to push out that SD WAN policy across all of those RWGs and build that mesh VPN tunnels as well as, push the configurations for all the branch offices out to all the individual RWGs. So typically you're gonna ha, you're gonna want to have a fairly standardized configuration, and you're gonna wanna have centralized control of that.

That's, that's something that, you know, many businesses, you know, really want to achieve. In fact, I'm, we're talking to some, hospitality, brands where, They're looking at that ability to have the brand control, you know, what the experience is at the individual hotels. So something like a Pack manager where you can define all that policy centrally and then cookie cutter it out.

It makes it really easy to maintain, you know, like a golden configuration you can call it at all your sites. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, cuz one of the things that used to drive me nuts is when you would get. You'd be like, oh, well, you know, all of our satellite offices or our branch offices, yeah, they all are sort of configured like this.

But then you go, oh, but this one over here in, you know, in Minnesota is, has its own little special configuration and Oh yeah, by the way, and the one in Oregon has its own little different one, and you're just like, and you get to that point where it's like, not only do I have to troubleshoot the problem, but now I have to figure out, well, what's that unique configuration?

So, I like the fact that, you know, you can end up with that sort of gold standard. So you don't, you're not worried about, you know, like, oh, well is each branch office configured differently because of some, you know, cuz it was configured at different times type of thing. So that's, that's nice. I like that.

John Deegan: Yeah. And the other, the other aspect to that, it's really nice is, let's say it's time to turn up a new branch, right? So I need, the RWG is gonna be my gateway and I, and I've got, you know, ICX switches and I've got RUCKUS APs, et cetera. What's really cool about the RWG is I can template that all out.

So if I have Pack manager, I can, I can push all that config out. I can just get someone to, to get the thing online to the point where it can talk to the Pack manager and then I can push out the config. Or I could even just ship like boxes, unopened boxes with switches and APs. And a, you know, the, the server with RWG on it, or it, it may not even have to have RWG on.

It could be a server like straight from Dell. And I can send someone out there who doesn't know what a MAC address or a VLAN is, have 'em plug a USB stick into that RWG and that USB stick when it boots, can install the software and, and all of the template configuration that you've built for it. 

And by the way, that templated configuration can also include Smart Zone and ICX configuration, so that can go out and connect to all of the switches and the Smart Zone and, and, and, you know, basically zero touch, right? So you talk about, we talk about Zero Touch, but there's, it's not always exactly Zero Touch. So we've gotten this close to that, you know, as we can, you gotta plug a USB stick in, right, and plug the power cable in, and of course you have to plug the ethernet cables together.

But as far as the config goes, it can all be done upfront. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, zero, Zero Touch was something that, I was messaging with Deegan about here, while you were talking in earlier and I was like, I was like, oh, do we go to Zero Touch? Do we not go to Zero Touch? There's, so, you know, and luckily you did it late enough in the episode that we can say we don't have time to go into Zero Touch, so, we, we get to say, we get to claim we talked about it without actually having to talk about it. So thank you. 

John Deegan: Nice. Well I do have one more question that it has nothing to do with Zero Touch. And actually it's, it's funny cuz I know Jim, this came up with Mobility Field Day. It was mentioned on the, presentation. And it also came up again for me.

I actually did my. Whatever quarter we're in, SE training and it came up again and I, I think as soon as it came up, I, I pinged Palmer. So you mentioned DPSK mangling, which I hear that and it makes me kind of scared cuz I feel like somebody's ripping a DPSK to shreds and it's just like all sorts of frightening and I'm imagining a acute and fluffy DPSK and yeah, we went off the deep end on this one.

And so it's not a bad thing from what I understand with training, even though it sounds kinda scary. So can you walk us through that and, you know, help me understand and help the, the audience kind of understand what DPSK mangling is and why it matters to us? 

John Murphy: Absolutely, John. And, you know, and it's quite possible that marketing did not approve that terminology, but, here's what it is, right?

DPSK mangling. Basically this ties into, there's, there's two kind of key. Features that this ties into. So one is d p sk, like you mentioned. So we have this, this DPSK functionality where we can use an external device as the source of truth for DPSK. So in this case s RWG. And then the other piece is the, a property management system integration that's in RWG. 

So if you think about a hotel, you know, they all, they all use these property management systems and when you check in, all your information goes into this database and it knows, you know, John Smith checked into room 205 and, and he's here for this duration of time and then he is gonna leave, right?

So since we already know that information, what we can do with RWG is we integrate with the PMS and then RWG has that information too. So it knows John Smith is in that room. And typically the way you would connect to, hotel wireless would be with a captive portal, which I know you guys love. I I love them quite dearly myself.

And, you would put in your last name and your room number and, and that works. But, but then, you know, you're connected to the Wi-Fi, but you know it's not an encrypted connection and you had to use the captive portal. So you've lost a little bit of your soul in the process. So instead of that, what we can do is just let you connect directly to a

Pre Shared Key network, right? So you're just putting in the password. Now what? What is that password? It's your last name and the room number. We know that because of the PMS integration, so instead of having to use the captive portal, I can just go connect to like a real Pre Shared Key encrypted network.

Put in my last name and my room number is the password, and I get on. And, and we know who you are. And if, by the way, if you wanted to have, you know, premier level access and we wanna charge you for that, we could, and RWG can store all that configuration for what that should cost and post that back to your folio, right?

So when you go to check out the charges there, but typically we like to give away Wi-Fi for free cuz you know, every guest wants that. So it's a great concept. You know, it got implemented. But then what happens when, you know, sometimes the, the guest may not quite understand, was I supposed to type my last name first and then my room number?

What if I do it in the other direction? Right. I did what you asked me, but it didn't work. Well, it's actually still gonna work. Cause that's what the mangling means. So we, we take what they typed in and. If there, if there's any combination of last name and room number that matches what the property management system says, then we're gonna let 'em on.

So that means they could put either the last name or the room number first, doesn't matter. And they could use like any kind of capitalization that they want to, as long as the room number and the last name match, we're gonna match it up to who that's supposed to be, and you're gonna get on the network.

So that's what DPSK mangling is. 

Jim Palmer: But when you enter, so let's, let's pre I like to point, I like to use things as if it's my mom doing it. So when my mom would check into the hotel and they're like, oh, you know, she goes, I want to connect to the Wi-Fi and my mother, no God love her, or hate her cuz she raised me, your choice.

But she's not, she's not very technically savvy. So when, when she opens up her phone to connect to the Wi-Fi, I. Is, is it just going to ask her for the passphrase or is it going to be a, you know, like, like you'd see for like a EAP PEAP connection where you get, you know, hey, what's your username and in one field and then your password in the next field?

Or, I mean, what does the end users actually see on their device? Is it just, Hey, enter in the passphrase and as long as they get their last name and room number, then it works. Or is it, or what do they see? What do they, I mean, is it just a single, single entry that they enter? 

John Murphy: Yeah. It's just, it's just a single passphrase.

Jim Palmer: Okay. 

John Murphy: And, and it's so, so the end user, like, the barrier to entry for this for end users, this is low as it could possibly be, right? Everyone knows how to connect to and network and type in a password. And every device that is allowed to put that Wi-Fi sticker on the box has that capability. 

Jim Palmer: Okay, 

John Murphy: So it, it means that like it doesn't matter what the device is, you just connect the network, put the password in, and, and, and the beauty of that also is there's no support for this required on the device side.

So as long as the device supports a standard WPA 2 Pre Shared key network, you can join it. 

Jim Palmer: Nice. 

John Deegan: Okay. That's pretty cool. I would definitely say we need a better name than mangling, but 

John Murphy: it definitely, yeah, we'll talk to market that now. 

John Deegan: It, it definitely gets your attention. So that's not necessarily a bad thing.

John Murphy: Yeah, I think that's probably why that, why that name was chosen. 

Jim Palmer: So we got, got one more question that we want to ask and before we let you go here and of, we've referenced it a couple times and we'll have the, a link to your Mobility Field Day 9 presentation in the. In the show notes. So if you haven't seen that, go, go find the link, click on it, and you can watch John, get grilled by people that are much more knowledgeable than, than Deegan and I.

But of all these different features that you'll see in this, on your slide as you, as you go through the RWG, what is, let's ask you, what is your favorite, or what is, what's your most favorite feature or the one thing that it solves that you, where you're like, You're like this, this is something I I, I've been waiting for and I love, and it really helps me and my customers out.

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you to pick one.

John Murphy: You really putting me on the spot here, Jim, you're gonna maybe pick one that is so difficult. So I'm gonna cheat, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say it's the integrated policy infrastructure that is the core of how you configure RWG, because that really is the magic, right? I mean, the ability to have a, a policy that dictates everything that happens to that user's traffic and can be dynamically changed based on other stuff that happens, like a security scan that we kick off, or the fact that you tried to hit the, the, the management interface.

200 times in 10 seconds or whatever, can dynamically change that policy into a different experience. So that, that's the, I'm gonna go with that. The, the, it's the policy engine. 

Jim Palmer: That's a, I did not expect you to say that, but that's a good answer. I, that is, yeah, that's a good one. I like that. 

John Deegan: You know what he did?

Cuz he, you know, we, you put him on the spot and he had to, he had came up with that one probably means we have to bring him back. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, we should probably do that. 

John Deegan: John's like, great. What did I sign up for? 

John Murphy: Well, I mean, there is so much to talk about. So like I said, there's no way we can cover it all on this, in this episode.

John Deegan: No, not unless we wanted make like a three hour episode and I really, as much as I do talk, no, I don't wanna do for three hours. I don't think I have anything else. Jim, do you, 

Jim Palmer: I, I have lots of questions, but, as we just decided, we don't like 

John Deegan: it's a family show. 

Jim Palmer: I Well, how many times were you use that joke?

Seriously? No. 

John Deegan: To infinity. 

Jim Palmer: Oh, no. I was gonna say, since we, since we just, you know, determined we don't want to do a three hour episode, I'm. I think for, for this introductory chunk or this introductory, you know, conversation about RWG, I think I will, I will table the rest of my questions that I have and, and yeah, we'll, we'll have to, to talk to Mr. Murphy and see about bringing him on at another time and maybe go through, you know, instead of that high level, maybe pick, pick one of the, you know, verticals or elements or focuses and, and spend a little bit more time on that. But I think, I think for now, I think, He's given us a lot to think about and try to, digest.

So I'm good. 

John Deegan: Cool. Well, John, before we send it up with the music, have any closing thoughts, final comments, anything you'd like to add? 

John Murphy: No, I really don't. I mean, all I would say is, you know, if, if you are interested in, in RWG, and, and you want to, you know, do a POC, good, good chance I'll be the guy working with you on that and, look forward to doing it.

John Deegan: Nice. Yep. Definitely reach out to, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're, you're, you're interested, reach out to your SE or your account manager and, and get the process started for a nice little, POC and we'll, we'll, we'll let you meet Mr. Murphy and get some autographs and Yeah. Fun stuff.

Yeah. 

Jim Palmer: And I'll, I'll get some. I'll get some, links put into the show notes, so hopefully we'll find a way that you could, possibly even contact us contact RUCKUS Networks, to get that started as well. So I'll, I'll see what I can dig out, you know, because apparently I'm supposed to be doing something other than taking the requirements from the customers to the engineers.

So I might as well figure out how you can contact the engineers. Nice. So I'll work on that and hopefully we'll have, we'll have something for you in the show notes. 

John Deegan: Nice. 

Otherwise, we'll just email Mittal. 

Jim Palmer: Oh, we could do that too. 

John Murphy: He loves that. 

John Deegan: Or his cell phone. He loves that too. He did give out his email address last time, so, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Anyways, well, on that note, gentlemen, I wanna thank everybody. Have a, a great rest of the day, your Thursday. And we will catch you guys on the next episode. 

John Murphy: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Happy Thursday everyone. 

Jim Palmer: Thanks everybody. 

John Murphy: Thank you.

John Deegan: All right, and I'm going to stop recording again.