How can I run with both wired and wireless interfaces?

With CDRouter Multiport, it’s possible to configure multiple LAN interfaces. Each interface may be either wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11. Refer to the CDRouter User Guide for and overview of CDRouter Multiport and testing with multiple interfaces.

Not all tests can be run on a wireless interface and some tests are specific to wireless devices. As a result, during startup CDRouter will automatically skip all modules and test cases that are not applicable based on the current configuration. For example, the eapol.tcl module requires a wireless interface and will be automatically skipped by CDRouter if a wireless interface is not configured.

Additional LAN interfaces can be added using the testvar_group configuration. When using both wired and wireless interfaces, QA Cafe recommends that you configure the first/main LAN interface as wireless. However, you can run with interfaces in either order.

Configuration Example

If the first LAN interface is configured as a wireless interface, a second Ethernet LAN interface would be configured as follows:

testvar_group lan2 {
   testvar lanInterface eth3
   testvar lanType ethernet
}

Switching LAN Interfaces

By default, CDRouter will sequentially cycle through all configured LAN interfaces while running tests. For example if you are running tests 1, 2, 3 with two configured LAN interfaces, lan and lan2, the first test will be executed using lan, the second using lan2, and third test case will go back to using lan.

If the test case requires a wireless interface CDRouter will skip any Ethernet interfaces and cycle on to the next wireless interface. As a result, a test run with both a wired and wireless interface will only attempt to run wireless specific tests using a wireless interface.

You can disable this behavior by configuring the testvar useSameLanInterface to yes. When useSameLanInterface is set to yes, the tests will also focus on the first LAN interfaces and additional interfaces will only be used when a test requires multiple LAN clients.

testvar useSameLanInterface yes

Interface Naming

The first LAN interface in the CDRouter configuration file is named lan. All protocol trace messages generated using the -trace option contain the name of the interface. For example:

INFO(lan): 15:31:03| Opening new TCP session 192.168.10.104:12958 -> 3.3.3.3:80

When additional interfaces are created, the testvar_group defines the name of the new interface. Additional LAN interfaces names must be called lan2, lan3, etc, up to lan64. The interfaces names can be used to determine which interface is used during a test case.

Running All Test Cases Against All Configured Interfaces

To make sure each test case is run against all configured interfaces, the cdrouter-cli -scount option can be used to run each test the same number of times as the number of defined interfaces. The -scount options runs each test a specific number of times before continuing on to the next test. This can also be done in the CDRouter web UI package editor when setting up the run time options. The Repeat each test __ times in a row. option is the same as -scount.

Notes and Caveats

To allow any of the eapol modules to execute when the wireless interface is not the main CDRouter interface, the testvar lanUseEAPOL should be set to yes for both the wireless interface and the main interface.

The base version of CDRouter only supports a single LAN interface. So you may configure either a wired Ethernet or a wireless 802.11 interface. However, you can not use both in the same test run.