Wi-Fi

Aruba APs - BSSID from MAC Address (Cont.)

Kieran Morton

• 2 min read

This morning I came across a tweet from Timothy Dennehy from the JustDoWiFi blog. He had published a blog post referring to the Aruba Airheads forum post I had mentioned in my previous post on this subject.

In his post, Timothy explains the process of converting the Ethernet MAC of the Aruba AP into a radio MAC to be used as the BSSID. He also mentions how it would be useful to automate this process by having a list of AP Ethernet MACs be processed all at once using an Excel sheet and some macro perhaps. This would prove to be very useful when staging APs as part of an installation.

I then replied suggesting the python script I had written in the previous post , and it got me thinking if the script could be used to read through a list of MACs and then complete the conversion on each MAC. So I've created just that. A Python script that will take an excel file containing a list of MACs (amongst other AP info) and perform the same MAC to BSSID conversion on each individual MAC.

The script is relatively simple, although does make use of the openpyxl python library - which would probably need to be installed using something like pip. The script also allows the structure of the excel file to be varied. For example, if a sheet contained the AP name, MAC, serial number, install location, and notes perhaps, the script can just read the cells in the MAC column.

The script will first open a file dialog for the user to select the correct excel file. It will then ask for the name of the worksheet (this is usually "Sheet1" but could be different if it's part of a larger more comprehensive workbook). Then the column containing the MACs and the starting row is requested. By requesting the starting row the script can omit any cells contained things like headings and the like. It will then finally request the number of BSSID's per radio (exactly like the original script). From here the script runs exactly the same as the previous one only it is being iterated over all of the possible cells in the specified column of the specified worksheet, with each cells value being presented as the input MAC address.

An example Excel spreadsheet containing AP information such as the Ethernet MAC
The output of the Python script after iterating through the Excel sheet

The script can be found on my gitlab repo.