Hey Everyone! I’m gonna just do a quick video on how to set up your SSID and how to get started when setting up your Meraki MR 33, MR 42.

To see the full video, please see it below or go to my channel innovative digital group.

This doesn’t really matter what type of MR you have. They are pretty much all the same. The dashboard is the same. Setting up the MR is pretty the same. It depends on certain options that you want like encryption key but basically the same content.

First, you will be going to account.meraki.com. You can Google Meraki dashboard. This is for some of my customers that are in Toronto that have purchased the equipment from us that hasn’t purchased our professional services to do the installation. Sometimes they just want to do a quick install and test for setting up the SSID to see if the trial or demo works. Innovative Digital Group Ltd. is an authorized Cisco Meraki Reseller based in the greater Toronto area.

Now, let’s log in. I’m gonna come over here to the dashboard. I’m going to click on my account. Here, in your client dashboard what you gonna see is the organization that you’re working with which is yours and the network that you created. You could create a new network. Let’s just use this called Gia’s home. Over here underneath wireless, when you purchased an MR series access point you will have this option wireless. If you only purchased a teleworker gateway or MX you will see security appliance. If you purchased an MS switch you will actually see their switch wireless.

When you set up your MR 33, first make sure you have your access point. Over here, you can actually see the lists of access points that are within your network. Green meaning- it’s online. Red meaning- it’s offline. On the MR access point when you physically look at it. Orange it’s connecting getting data. Red is offline. Blue there’s a link to it. With the Meraki dashboard, you can see some statistic and you can see which users are connected, you can ping the signal strength, you know how long you’ve been associated with the SSID, the usage they are downloading and the connectivity for the last day. I guess this is why Cisco Meraki so popular because the dashboard is so easy to use and everything is at your fingertips.

Prior to setting up access points in the past, you’d always be using Excel spreadsheets, a word sheet writing down the MAC address, writing down the SSID but with Meraki, everything is so easy to use and well documented. Also, there’s only one place to go to the dashboard to see everything.

You could see that I’m running 2.4, 5. What kind of profile it has, the LAN IP, the public IP, you don’t have to do what is my IP, the gateway and the DNS. I am running full-duplex. There’s so much more that you can do with this. I’m gonna set up quickly the SSID. Right now, I enabled my SSID. Now, what I’m gonna do is create another SSID. I will show you all my SSIDs. You can see all unconfigured and what I’m gonna do is rename one of them. I’m gonna rename it a “test”. Then, I’m gonna edit settings. Now, this will bring me to unconfigured SSID. Here, you will actually set up your network access. Basically this is the encryption part. Click open which is no password which I don’t recommend. On pre-shared key choose WPA 2 and then you can put your key. In your encryption mode what I recommend, if you’re new in setting up wireless networks. Select WPA2 and WPA 1 so that the pre-shared key isn’t restricted to WPA 2. But if you know what you’re doing and you know that all your clients are going to be selecting WPA 2 then fine. The majority of you know, customers that are running guests networks they’re not sure what they’re gonna pick. They’ll just either pick WPA1 or WPA2 so you just say your technical support team. So it doesn’t have such big headaches getting a lot of questions.

The splash page is actually if you wanted to get like a guest login page you can do that very easy. I’ll do another video on how to set up a splash page. But, when we’re with restaurants we actually do a radius server where we can collect social net analytics and get someone to log in with their Facebook account or their Instagram or the Google+. The owner of that restaurant can actually get analytics data demographics and kind of retarget or remarket to them.

Here’s an important thing which is the NAT mode. If you had an existing network. Let’s say you have 192168 and you point your sale on your windows server or your stealing server or your WMS server was on your 192 networks. Then, you want to make sure that’s on a bridge mode. Basically, this is gonna make clients part of your existing lend. Let’s say your point of sale system or your WMS server is 192.168.104. whatever, they will bridge and be transparent onto the same network. So, it really depends if you have one VLAN, flat VLAN or multiple VLANs but this will become part of the LAN.

The second option which I see most customers will select is NAT mode. This will use Meraki internal DHCP address and it will give you something like 10.0.0.0.1 or dot 2 and it will be kind of separated from everything else that you have only network. This will give you the basic wireless. When you connect to that SSID. When you have an existing network and it’s getting in your access point is getting DHCP from your router or your windows firewall select this bridge mode. If you’re not sure, select the NAT mode. If you’re using a guest WIFI use the NAT mode to be on the safe side. If it’s connecting to your existing network then choose “bridge mode”.

VLAN tagging is more advanced stuff. I’m not going to go through content filtering. If you are in a congested environment where you’re not sure if there’s log of congestion on the 2.4. I would select 5 gig only because with 5 gigahertz you have a lot of cleaner air. Meaning, you don’t have a lot of neighbors that are running 2.4 which will clog your RS spectrum and then your users will complain but if you know that your 2.4 is clean then you can use it but I just used 5 gig. Just keep in mind that with 5 gig you have a lot more bandwidth that you can use and can download more if your internet pipe is big enough. The coverage drops a lot with 5 gigs. 2.4 you have more coverage area with less bandwidth but with 5 gigs it’s the opposite.

Now, without set up the SSID what you want to do is click on Save over here on the bottom. Now, we’ll go back to SSIDs and we’re gonna go over show all of my SSIDs. Since we already save the WPA encryption settings then we will rename this and call “test” then click Save. Then come back here to enable then save. That’s it for setting up the very basic SSID. It is very easy within Meraki. It only gets complicated when you’re securing and locking down your network when you’re dealing more with enterprises and you’re dealing with warehouse management system as I do. You really want to make sure that your VLANs are sight segmented properly.

That’s just the basic. I could get into more detail of VLANs and securing RF network, your wireless network in the future.

If you like the video please comment with any questions that you have. I can get into more details as I said. I’ll see you in my next video!


We provide installation services for all Meraki wireless access points, switches and MX firewalls in and around the Toronto area.

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