We have a wireless access point at a client site. They say it goes down a lot. We replaced it. They say it still goes down a lot. Nobody's happy.
Now, in some instances, "WAP down" turned out to be a message from Outlook saying it lost connection to their hosted Exchange server. In one case, "WAP down" came from a desktop user on a wired connection... However, in other cases, it did seem like several people all lost their wireless connections at the same time. We know something's going on, we're just not sure what. (The firewall assures us that it is not losing WAN or LAN connections).
I have a little XP laptop that I'm going to drop at their site tomorrow and connect to the wireless network. I have some remote access / agent tools on it so I already have bit of a plan to try and watch availability.
However, I'm curious how other admins would approach this. Are there any great apps or tools that I might load on this laptop while it is on site? Tricks of the trade? Tips? I'm looking for more than ping -t google.com > pingtext.txt
:-)
[added later]
The WAP is a SonicPoint N series, works in conjunction with the SonicWall NSA240 already there.
My diagnostic XP laptop will unfortunately be wifi only.