missing access points

[BOB IROC]

I was wondering if anyone has used or can recommend an application that can approximate location of access points maybe like in a radar fashion. We recently ended up firing the head tech of one of my High Schools because he was cheating the time clock system by punching in and out from home and now I have been assigned to clean up his mess and make a list of things to clean up for when we hire a replacement. Well one of the biggest things he screwed up is the wireless and I guess we didn't check up on his work enough because we seem to be missing access points. They are connected to the network but I do not know where they are in the ceiling. So aside from opening up the ceiling tiles of a large high school I was hoping to get an app that can help me find these things. It can be for a laptop or I have an iPhone and have co-workers that have WinMobile based phones. I am searching the Apple App store and not finding anything concrete and thought I would post here to see if any of you had any ideas while I continue my search.

We are migrating our Access Points (all Cisco) to a more secure network with multiple SSID's and better encryption and access restriction methods. So any unfound and migrated or replaced access points will have the old SSID on them so I can search for that. I have found a couple but can only trace them to the network closet and switchport they are plugged into which helps a little but aside from tracing that cable which could be hundreds of feet I have no idea how to determine the location of that access point.

Thanks

[CCT]

While maybe a little far-fetched, couldn't you shield a portable comp such that the signal was very weak and then amble about until you found spots where it got a stong (stronger) signal?

[BOB IROC]

While maybe a little far-fetched, couldn't you shield a portable comp such that the signal was very weak and then amble about until you found spots where it got a stong (sronger) signal?

Kind of tried that a little bit but we have quite a few access points and found that I couldn't get an accurate reading to see where they were. I am thinking I am just going have to come in on a saturday and shut down the ports on all the known access points (which should hopefully be most of them) and since they are POE it will power down the AP and then use a laptop or a WiFi device to get that signal. When I managed that building 6 - 7 years ago I had everything organized and labeled and mostly documented but when we replaced a good chunk of our Wireless-B APs about 4 years ago the tech that took over did a terrible job. Now we are trying to replace the rest of the Wireless-B APs with Wireless-N APs so we will have some Wireless-G and some Wireless-N and I cannot find about 10 -15 Access points in that building out of about 80 or so.

Thank you for the suggestion and I might just have to do that but after I shutdown the APs that I kmow and have already located and migrated to the new system. Since I know the network closet and switchport it should narrow down my searching a little bit.

Man I hate cleaning up after other people's messes.

I am still open to see if anybody knows of a application that can be used to triangulate the locations of things like Access Points. It would be most helpful.

[CCT]

Interesting reading; http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache...&ct=clnk&gl=ca

Especially the use of GPS to identify access points.

[BOB IROC]

Yeah that WiFiFoFum app is exactly what I am looking for. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find anything recent that will run on WinMobile 6.x or the iPhone. If it worked like it I hope it would I would get my organization to pay for it unless it was a totally outrageous price. I would love to make up to date accurate maps of my Accesss point locations in all of my high schools. I have the CAD drawings and it could be done quite easily I am sure.

[BOB IROC]

Well what do you know... They have that WiFiFoFum app for the iPhone. Now all I gotta do is verify that the radar is at least semi-accurate of the AP location and this may do the trick and be worth the $2.99 for the app.