Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless in Residence Halls
We had the APs for our highrise dorms located in the hallways which was convenient for installation and maintenance, but it made for a poor RF design. Lots of co-channel interference and dynamic power management problems. Moving them into student rooms solved this, although coordinating the installation with the residents was a hassle. We have not seen an increase in loss, damage or troubles. Every once in a great while we get a user who is concerned with health aspects of having an AP in their room. -Karl Reuss University of Maryland College Park ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] eduroam question(s)
On 11/12/2012 6:39 PM, Lee H Badman wrote: Does anyone keep stats on how much your Eduroam efforts get used? Like, other than just being in the club, is it really providing benefits that an easy-to-use guest network wouldn't? Not being snarky, but genuinely wondering. We don't have any officially generated stats but a quick check of the numbers for this month shows we've had about 2000 traditional guests and 500 eduroam guests. The advantage eduroam guests had is that they were pre-approved before coming to campus and their devices were already setup. Our guest system is a little clunky and could use some cleanup, but it will never just work like eduroam does for it's users. We also get good feedback from our faculty and staff who visit other institutions, and that is hard to quantify with stats. So far this month about 150 of our folks have authenticated at other eduroam sites. -Karl ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] 4-channels in 2.4 GHz
Cisco has a paper on this with some graphs showing energy overlap on 4 channel deployments for both 802.11b and 802.11g. The 802.11g OFDM signal seemed more prone to interference in a 4 channel setup so we stuck with 1,6,11. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/technology/channel/deployment/guide/Channel.html -Karl Reuss University of Maryland, College Park ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] NAT in large scale wireless networks
Last academic year we ran NAT on our main wireless network. We had about 13,000 unique users per day and about 8,000 simultaneous connections at peak times, roughly 95% student traffic. It worked, but there were a couple of issues for us: 1) Picking the correct NAT box. Catalysts 6500s do wirespeed NAT, but they can't keep up with the number of new connections per second. A single ASA5550 handled the job well, now we have a pair. 2) The NAT logs are enormous. Finding space to keep them is fun, going through them to find incidents is painful. We did NAT because we added wireless to our dorms last year and we weren't sure what the pace of our rollout would be, or how fast the users would migrate over. We didn't want to be shuffling IP ranges all year. We'll be going back to fixed IP addresses next year for most wireless use. -Karl Reuss University of Maryland, College Park Michael Dickson wrote: Though we currently have enough available routed IP space for our wireless clients we are looking toward the future and wondering if NAT-ing the wireless network makes sense. Does anyone have any experiences, good or bad, using NAT for the wireless client pool in a large scale environment? What features go away (i.e. RFID or user tracking, etc.) Are there any gotchas? We're an Aruba shop and expect about 3000+ wireless clients this semester and have been adding more APs by the week. Thanks, Mike *** Michael Dickson Phone: 413-545-9639 Network Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Massachusetts Network Systems and Services *** ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Monitor lightweight APs through NMS
Hector J Rios wrote: The issue is that we want to see the APs in NMS with their names associated to an IP and a MAC address. If your NMS supports ICMP you can just have it ping the APs. That way the NMS will get basic up/down info for them. Beyond that you'll need to do as Mike suggested and have your NMS and controllers talk via SNMP. The controllers have a fairly rich MIB; I believe everything the WCS knows is obtained via SNMP from the controllers. Of course programming your NMS to obtain all of this info is essentially recreating the WCS product. It's a shame the WCS can't generate some higher level traps from the info obtains from the controllers. -Karl ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Authentication method comparison
Jonn Martell wrote: Hi Donald, You don't need to have AD to support PEAP. Your RADIUS/LDAP infrastructure does need to support MSCHAPv2 (aka native NT users and domains). Look how RADIATOR does it for a good off-the-shelf solution to supporting PEAP on a non-Microsoft backend. One thing to watch out for, however, is that most (all?) non-Microsoft implementations of MSCHAPv2 require the radius server to have access to the plain text user password. Some sites may have this, others not. It depends on whether you are running Kerberos, LDAP, etc. Some LDAP implementations will save it plain text, others (like ours!) do not. -Karl ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Highrise dorm RF design
We're getting ready to expand our campus wireless coverage into the dorms; full coverage for 12,000 students over the next year. The recent dorm discussions here have been very helpful. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with dense AP deployments in traditional high-rise dorms. About half of our students live in these monsters. 8 floors, 250' straight hallway down the middle of each, rooms on either side, block walls, 70 users per floor. Sort of like prison cells:) Our field guys and residential facilities folks would rather not put the APs in student rooms, which basically just leaves the hallways. I'm worried about co-channel interference on the b/g side. 6 or 7 APs down a hallway in clear sight of each other will surely step on each other. Loss through the floors only seems to be 10db, which means we need to watch the vertical as well. Dropping power would only help a little, and at the expense of room penetration. External patch antennas are one idea were looking at. If anyone has any experience or advice in this area they could share, I would be grateful! Thanks, -Karl Reuss University of Maryland, College Park ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
