Jon Markwell has a great (and thorough!) article about how they set up
internet at his spot.

http://jonathanmarkwell.com/2014/11/22/best-coworking-wifi/

Since reading it, we've switched everything to the hardware/software setup
he recommended and it's been *awesome*.

Besides basic firewall defaults built into the gateway, we aren't blocking
anything specific. It's a HUGE drag on support (and a really crappy member
experience) when folks go to use something and it doesn't work but they
don't know why.

Instead, we focus on making issues easy to spot and diagnose. In our most
recent move, we added some new Unifi hardware, notably their 24 port switch
and their USG router/gateway.

The best part of using the gateway is that now I have this amazing
dashboard that I can access from anywhere, including my mobile phone:



If we're having any sort of network issues, I (or my team) can easily see
who's potentially causing the issue and go talk to them.

99 times out of 100, the person who is doing something that causes issues
on the network has no idea that what they're doing is causing trouble, or
even more often, what they're doing is part of their work so BLOCKING them
entirely would be counterproductive. File syncs over dropbox, Youtube
uploads, even scheduled cloud backups among a few other things come to
mind. Other times they just forgot to turn a program off that's sucking up
tons of bandwidth.

Unifi's Gateway also has a new feature called "Smart Queues" which we've
been using for a few weeks and has all but entirely fixed these kinds of
problems for us automatically.

A single Unifi Gateway + 6 of their Unifi AP Pro wireless access points are
supporting 100-120 people daily without breaking a sweat.

We built some extra monitoring tools (mostly because our internet provider,
Comcast, is f'ing terrible but we don't have other options) that we will be
documenting and open sourcing very soon, along with a more detailed
schematic, shopping list, and config suggestions.

At this point, I wouldn't fool around with any hardware except for Unifi.
They've given the enterprise tools a massive run for their money at a
fraction of the cost, and give the most flexible and friendly tools for
managing that my non-technical team members are comfortable helping folks
with basic network issues.

-Alex






------------------
*The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.*
Better Coworkers: http://indyhall.org
Weekly Coworking Tips: http://coworkingweekly.com
My Audiobook: https://theindyhallway.com/ten

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 2:34 PM, <alison.kle...@clickworkspace.org> wrote:

> Hoping to get some input on cable Internet setups. Specifically, do you
> use a firewall as part of your system? What was the decision-making
> behind that? We're thinking we might be better off without one, or at least
> to make it an opt-in.
>
> Thanks for sharing,
> Alison Klejna, Click Workspace, Northampton, MA
>
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