RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
At Syracuse, we had a stringent no rogues policy since early on, endorsed by our CIO and enforced as we see 'em. The interference issue is one concern, but security is another as our NAC and hostreg systems are bypassed when the rogues come to town. Many students don't know about the don't install your own policy (it's a rule, not a request for us) despite the many ways we try to get the word to them before they get here as freshmen, and during move-in. At the same time, we do a good enough job that the number we have to take down during a semester is manageable, and most of them are found and eliminated from my office as we've developed good methodology for identification and removal that rarely needs feet on the ground to find them. I firmly believe that growing the culture for all campus demographics (not just students- faculty and staff as well) that rogues aren't allowed with good education on why- has been a big part of our success. We restrict our games to the wired network at this point and that is a very clean delineation. Not sure how long we can get away with it going forward... we do have unique situations where we go outside of the it either does 802.1x or it goes on the wire party line. We quietly MAC-register certain devices on our guest WLAN (powered by Bluesocket)- like game consoles used by students in leased hotel space off campus. We have brought in the campus WLAN for them, but the wired network is the hotel's, with both performance and support by hotel being disappointing. We also have Korean students with myLGNet VOIP/WLAN phones that show up with a very loud wireless router as a base station. We make them put the base station away but in return register them on the guest network so they can now wander campus to talk to home, rather than just be restricted to their base station. And we have a few toy robots, Kindles, horrible smartphones that take 617 steps to maybe get going on .1x if the moon is in the right phase, that we also quietly put into the guest space. We don't advertise it, but it serves as a good solution for when things don't fit the .1x network and the wired network isn't the answer. Lee H. Badman Wireless/Network Engineer Information Technology and Services Adjunct Instructor, iSchool Syracuse University 315 443-3003 From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Justin Sipher Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 7:53 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues Hi all, I see Frank came across the article from our student newspaper. Bravo as it was published late late night. Must be a Google-Alert or something equivalent. :-) (btw that is how I saw it about 5am today also) The student (freshman) reporter did a decent job with the article but with any situation like this they missed what I consider to be important details that this group would appreciate. I worked had to help explain things in layman's terms. Something we all strive to do. We had a very-brief but noticeable DNS hiccup on Monday on our acad/admin LAN. As you know know DNS is like air, all our network services need it to live. I won't bother you with the DNS problem that is now resolved. That triggered them to ask about other (but totally unrelated) network issues. The meat of the issue is our ResNet wifi service. We added Wifi in the dorms last academic year. As the article states we have outsources ResNet to our regional broadband provider (TW Cable) 6+ years ago. I'm a big fan of this as the Internet bandwidth, 24x7 tech support, and infrastructure support is as good if not better than we could do locally. I also think this relates to IT letting go of things where we don't provide strategic value. Residential networking on campus, is similar to that off-campus (if you have off-campus student populations). The issue of outsourcing may be somewhat of an aside for this list. Anyway, after testing their residential wifi solution (~ 2 years ago) we decided to go with a hardware solution they have used in hotels, etc.. It's an external antenna solution from Bel-Air. I know TWC (and frankly us also) were not prepared for the extent of the demand. TWC was thinking that if we have ~ 2k students in the dorms they would need to support up to 1500 users/devices simultaneously. Before we went live we educated them to the reality of today's 18-22 year old regarding # of wifi devices and the always on nature of the users and/or their devices. We got them to use 802.1x rather than browser redirect authentication to allow for usable mobile access. TWC Bel-Air are making progress technically. I think our biggest current challenge is a cat and mouse situation with personal AP's. I'd say we have 400+ personal AP's in the dorms. This is causing interference and making thing worse. Is banning personal
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Access points with very low performance when multiple users connect their computers at the same time.
Hi Marcus, hmmm , you have a good point. However, we have tried to isolate the server connection (Moodle server) using wired connections at the same moment. Our conclusion is that the access points can't manage so many connections at the same time. Thanks! Luis Fernando --- Luis Fernando Valverde Director de Tecnología de Información y Comunicaciones INCAE Business School Tel: 506+ 24 37 23 38 www.incae.edu On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marcus Burton marcus.bur...@peachtreewireless.com wrote: Can you elaborate on the problem that you described as response time behaves very slowly for several minutes, until the traffic network stabilizes and reaches a better performance. I agree that this is probably a saturated RF link, but I'm curious if the slow responses are during or after authentication (possibly an authentication server utilization problem?). Marcus Burton, CWNP I agree with Joel, 80-100 users per AP is a bit much on an AP. What's the ratio of 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz? I'm not familiar with the 1240 (have a couple but none of them work), do they have any smartRF built in (can they nudge dual band clients to 5 GHz)? -- Heath Barnhart, CCNA Information Systems Services Washburn University Topeka, KS 66621 On 11/10/2011 11:30 AM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote: Your problem is probably air time density. The issue is that you only have 3 non-overlapping channels to work with in the 2.4Ghz space, most users won't have 5Ghz-capable laptops, each channel only supports about 25 clients from a practical standpoint, each access point is likely only listening on one specific channel, and you have up to 400 users trying to connect all at about the same time. That's just not going to work. Things get better a few minutes after a class starts because some students will just give up, and most others will settle down to only use air time only in short bursts, as they load and then pause to read pages. The typical solution is turning down the transmit power, such that signal for each access point does not leave it's own classroom, and then add access points to each classroom such that you're listening on more of the available channels within the rooms. The goal is to reduce the cell size (and therefore number of clients) served by each access point, and increase the available channels. You can do this by adding access points, or by getting single access points with multiple independent radios that are capable of using the additional channels simultaneously. Even here, you'll likely still have issues as many of the laptops will not turn down power to their own radios and still clutter up the air space. It would be like trying to listen to the professor if most students in the classroom were also having conversations among each other at their normal speaking volume. As for distributing traffic, there are different load-balancing options out there depending on your vendor. But even with generic thick access points you'll see quite of bit of load balancing happens naturally, without you having to do anything special so encourage it. You ought to be able to just add the access points without needing to do much of anything for load balancing. Joel Coehoorn IT Director York College 402.363.5603 On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Ethan Sommer somm...@gac.edu wrote: With almost any manufacturer you can set a max number of clients per radio. You could set the max per radio to 25ish and put (capacity of classroom/25) APs per classroom. On 11/10/2011 10:54 AM, Luis Fernando Valverde wrote: Hello, we have four adjacent classrooms (two in front of two and 5 meters between each one) with capacity to 80-100 students each one.Each classroom has its own Cisco Aironet 1240 AG Access Point. When all the students inside the classroom connect their computers to the wireless network, response time behaves very slowly for several minutes, until the traffic network stabilizes and reaches a better performance. We have tested other AP including Ruckus (802.11 b/g/n) and the problem remains. We could install two AP by classroom, but we would need to distribute the connections between each one. Does someone know a solution without having to use different SSIDs to distribute traffic among multiple access points? Does someone have any suggestion to solve this issue, including other access point manufacturer? Any comment is welcome. Thanks, --- Luis Fernando Valverde Director de Tecnología de Información y Comunicaciones INCAE Business School Tel: 506+ 24 37 23 38 www.incae.edu ** Participation and
RE: College deals with wireless issues
And what if somebody pays your $40 per semester to connect their personal AP to your network? Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY 40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011 From: Hanset, Philippe C [mailto:phan...@utk.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 8:44 PM Subject: Re: College deals with wireless issues If you provide a great wifi coverage and no wired access You shouldn't have to worry about rogues (since there is No port to connect to ;-) Philippe, University. Of TN, Knoxville On Nov 10, 2011, at 8:29 PM, Jeff Kell jeff-k...@utc.edumailto:jeff-k...@utc.edu wrote: On 11/10/2011 8:24 PM, Harry Rauch wrote: We have in our internet docs for students that rogue wireless devices that interferes with the dorm's internet usage will be requested to shutdown or the student will lose internet rights for 30 days. Students seem to be more than willing to shut off their wireless router after they are made aware of the problem; they honestly don't have a clue about the effects of their personal wireless and the school's. We have similar policies. If we detect a rogue (shows up in our NAC as a NATed client), we quarantine the MAC address of the router. If they connect to their rogue wireless, they get a captive portal telling them to disconnect it! If they then connect directly, they are fine again. Other than us having to mark the MACs, it is self-remediating (and if the MAC returns, it gets the same result, regardless of the jack/location). Jeff ** 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/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
RE: College deals with wireless issues
You're lucky. Our students would complain to their parents and/or the administration and we would have to provide wireless for them. Our current 802.1X wireless plans for our residences have a WPA2-Enterprise SSID and an open SSID to allow individual mac address registered devices and to allow access to Cloudpath XpressConnect to provision the client for the 8-02.1X SSID. Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY 40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011 From: Brian Helman [mailto:bhel...@salemstate.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 9:00 PM Subject: Re: College deals with wireless issues Philippe, Do you guys support gaming consoles? Our Wii users can't use our wireless .. no wpa2/Enterprise. And we are throttling (or even blocking) video more on wireless than on wired. You'd be surprised how quickly students plug in when they realize that. -Brian From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] on behalf of Hanset, Philippe C [phan...@utk.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 8:44 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDUmailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues If you provide a great wifi coverage and no wired access You shouldn't have to worry about rogues (since there is No port to connect to ;-) Philippe, University. Of TN, Knoxville On Nov 10, 2011, at 8:29 PM, Jeff Kell jeff-k...@utc.edumailto:jeff-k...@utc.edu wrote: On 11/10/2011 8:24 PM, Harry Rauch wrote: We have in our internet docs for students that rogue wireless devices that interferes with the dorm's internet usage will be requested to shutdown or the student will lose internet rights for 30 days. Students seem to be more than willing to shut off their wireless router after they are made aware of the problem; they honestly don't have a clue about the effects of their personal wireless and the school's. We have similar policies. If we detect a rogue (shows up in our NAC as a NATed client), we quarantine the MAC address of the router. If they connect to their rogue wireless, they get a captive portal telling them to disconnect it! If they then connect directly, they are fine again. Other than us having to mark the MACs, it is self-remediating (and if the MAC returns, it gets the same result, regardless of the jack/location). Jeff ** 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/. ** 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: Access points with very low performance when multiple users connect their computers at the same time.
I agree. Also, upgrade to 802.11 a/b/g/n APs, preferably with gigabit uplinks. The 1240 AG are a/b/g with a single 100 meg uplink. Several years ago, we moved from fat AP 1240G ( 802.11b.g only) APs to an Aruba 802.11 a/b/g/n AP system. The users immediately noticed improvement with more client bandwidth and the intelligence of a controller based system. You did not say whether your APs are fat or thin, but I believe I read where Cisco is discontinuing support for thin 1240s in their controller software. Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY 40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011 From: Voll, Toivo [mailto:to...@usf.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:54 PM Subject: Re: Access points with very low performance when multiple users connect their computers at the same time. Additional features that are helpful are ones that help dual-band clients prefer the 5GHz spectrum (Cisco and Aruba have their own names for this), and turning off all the low data rates so that air time isn’t destroyed by a few smart phones or bad clients hanging onto 2 mbps rates. Depending on budget and layout, you can also try to RF-engineering with directional (patch) antennas and such, to control cell size and shape. Toivo Voll Network Administrator Information Technology Communications University of South Florida From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU]mailto:[mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Coehoorn, Joel Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:31 To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDUmailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Access points with very low performance when multiple users connect their computers at the same time. Your problem is probably air time density. The issue is that you only have 3 non-overlapping channels to work with in the 2.4Ghz space, most users won't have 5Ghz-capable laptops, each channel only supports about 25 clients from a practical standpoint, each access point is likely only listening on one specific channel, and you have up to 400 users trying to connect all at about the same time. That's just not going to work. Things get better a few minutes after a class starts because some students will just give up, and most others will settle down to only use air time only in short bursts, as they load and then pause to read pages. The typical solution is turning down the transmit power, such that signal for each access point does not leave it's own classroom, and then add access points to each classroom such that you're listening on more of the available channels within the rooms. The goal is to reduce the cell size (and therefore number of clients) served by each access point, and increase the available channels. You can do this by adding access points, or by getting single access points with multiple independent radios that are capable of using the additional channels simultaneously. Even here, you'll likely still have issues as many of the laptops will not turn down power to their own radios and still clutter up the air space. It would be like trying to listen to the professor if most students in the classroom were also having conversations among each other at their normal speaking volume. As for distributing traffic, there are different load-balancing options out there depending on your vendor. But even with generic thick access points you'll see quite of bit of load balancing happens naturally, without you having to do anything special so encourage it. You ought to be able to just add the access points without needing to do much of anything for load balancing. Joel Coehoorn IT Director York College 402.363.5603 On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Ethan Sommer somm...@gac.edumailto:somm...@gac.edu wrote: With almost any manufacturer you can set a max number of clients per radio. You could set the max per radio to 25ish and put (capacity of classroom/25) APs per classroom. On 11/10/2011 10:54 AM, Luis Fernando Valverde wrote: Hello, we have four adjacent classrooms (two in front of two and 5 meters between each one) with capacity to 80-100 students each one.Each classroom has its own Cisco Aironet 1240 AG Access Point. When all the students inside the classroom connect their computers to the wireless network, response time behaves very slowly for several minutes, until the traffic network stabilizes and reaches a better performance. We have tested other AP including Ruckus (802.11 b/g/n) and the problem remains. We could install two AP by classroom, but we would need to distribute the connections between each one. Does someone know a solution without having to use different SSIDs to distribute traffic among multiple access points? Does someone have any suggestion to solve this issue, including other access point manufacturer? Any comment
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
Pay $40 to violate our AUP and have a chance to be disconnected and not recover $40. I guess you can never discard dumb people! We will handle them carefully and one by one ;-) Philippe On Nov 11, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Osborne, Bruce W wrote: And what if somebody pays your $40 per semester to connect their personal AP to your network? Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY 40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011 From: Hanset, Philippe C [mailto:phan...@utk.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 8:44 PM Subject: Re: College deals with wireless issues If you provide a great wifi coverage and no wired access You shouldn't have to worry about rogues (since there is No port to connect to ;-) Philippe, University. Of TN, Knoxville On Nov 10, 2011, at 8:29 PM, Jeff Kell jeff-k...@utc.edumailto:jeff-k...@utc.edu wrote: On 11/10/2011 8:24 PM, Harry Rauch wrote: We have in our internet docs for students that rogue wireless devices that interferes with the dorm's internet usage will be requested to shutdown or the student will lose internet rights for 30 days. Students seem to be more than willing to shut off their wireless router after they are made aware of the problem; they honestly don't have a clue about the effects of their personal wireless and the school's. We have similar policies. If we detect a rogue (shows up in our NAC as a NATed client), we quarantine the MAC address of the router. If they connect to their rogue wireless, they get a captive portal telling them to disconnect it! If they then connect directly, they are fine again. Other than us having to mark the MACs, it is self-remediating (and if the MAC returns, it gets the same result, regardless of the jack/location). Jeff ** 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 athttp://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found athttp://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] Access points with very low performance when multiple users connect their computers at the same time.
On 11/11/11 15:36 , Osborne, Bruce W wrote: I read where Cisco is discontinuing support for thin 1240s in their controller software. You might have read it somewhere, but it is incorrect :) -- Daniel ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive non-wired coverage using $40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their own $40 AP. I didn't use word, wireless, but non-wired instead. Will carrier be not interested to penetrate such market? On Fri, 2011-11-11 at 15:39 +, Hanset, Philippe C wrote: Pay $40 to violate our AUP and have a chance to be disconnected and not recover $40. I guess you can never discard dumb people! We will handle them carefully and one by one ;-) Philippe On Nov 11, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Osborne, Bruce W wrote: And what if somebody pays your $40 per semester to connect their personal AP to your network? Bruce Osborne Wireless Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY 40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011 From: Hanset, Philippe C [mailto:phan...@utk.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 8:44 PM Subject: Re: College deals with wireless issues If you provide a great wifi coverage and no wired access You shouldn't have to worry about rogues (since there is No port to connect to ;-) Philippe, University. Of TN, Knoxville On Nov 10, 2011, at 8:29 PM, Jeff Kell jeff-k...@utc.edu wrote: On 11/10/2011 8:24 PM, Harry Rauch wrote: We have in our internet docs for students that rogue wireless devices that interferes with the dorm's internet usage will be requested to shutdown or the student will lose internet rights for 30 days. Students seem to be more than willing to shut off their wireless router after they are made aware of the problem; they honestly don't have a clue about the effects of their personal wireless and the school's. We have similar policies. If we detect a rogue (shows up in our NAC as a NATed client), we quarantine the MAC address of the router. If they connect to their rogue wireless, they get a captive portal telling them to disconnect it! If they then connect directly, they are fine again. Other than us having to mark the MACs, it is self-remediating (and if the MAC returns, it gets the same result, regardless of the jack/location). Jeff ** 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 athttp://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found athttp://www.educause.edu/groups/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. -- Leo Song, Senior Analyst Cluster Lead Computing and Communication Services - Networking and Security University of Guelph (519) 824-4120 x 53181 ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive non-wired coverage using $40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their own $40 AP. Actually, you can do that. Those cheap $40 access points can be easily reconfigured to act as a thick access point by just turning off dhcp, setting a static IP in the correct range, and connecting your uplink line to a LAN port rather than the WAN port. Spend about $100 on a nice buffalo that supports dd-wrt with a customized config file ready to load, and you can get something close to a vendor system for less than 1/4 the price. Of course, that means doing a lot of leg work yourself: configuring access points, setting up subnets/zones, multiple ssids, security, and every change means a manual deployment to individual access points. I'd love to see a feature added to dd-wrt that allows polling a config server for those. But the really big thing you give up here is the reporting. You can make up for some of that with existing syslog or gateway reporting tools, but some of the information you'd get from a controller-based solution is just not replaceable. Joel Coehoorn IT Director 402.363.5603 On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 10:11 AM, leo song s...@uoguelph.ca wrote: ** If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive non-wired coverage using $40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their own $40 AP. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
Not sure where you draw the line for consumer, but I think some of the stuff from CyberGuys are POE. I know home/dorm users that purchase from them. http://www.cyberguys.com/product-listings/?categoryid=298 And more specifically: http://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=55359 -drl -- Dan Lunceford Manager of Networking Services New Mexico Tech dluncef...@admin.nmt.edu, 575-835-5961 -Original Message- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Hanset, Philippe C Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 10:51 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues no but you can use this: http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-Power-Over-Ethernet-Adapter/dp/B Y7W98 We made a cost analysis for our dorms way back in 2006-07 about Controller based architecture or doing our own open-wrt. Much cheaper up front, but we didn't want to deal with the management aspect (channels, etc...). Philippe Univ. of TN, Knoxville On Nov 11, 2011, at 12:40 PM, Matthew Gracie wrote: On 11/11/2011 11:58 AM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote: If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive non-wired coverage using $40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their own $40 AP. Actually, you can do that. Those cheap $40 access points can be easily reconfigured to act as a thick access point by just turning off dhcp, setting a static IP in the correct range, and connecting your uplink line to a LAN port rather than the WAN port. Spend about $100 on a nice buffalo that supports dd-wrt with a customized config file ready to load, and you can get something close to a vendor system for less than 1/4 the price. Of course, that means doing a lot of leg work yourself: configuring access points, setting up subnets/zones, multiple ssids, security, and every change means a manual deployment to individual access points. I'd love to see a feature added to dd-wrt that allows polling a config server for those. But the really big thing you give up here is the reporting. You can make up for some of that with existing syslog or gateway reporting tools, but some of the information you'd get from a controller-based solution is just not replaceable. Slightly off-topic, but are there any consumer level APs that support Power-over-Ethernet? That would be the huge sticking point for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Most people haven't run AC to their ceiling data drops. -- Matt Gracie (716) 888-8378 Information Security Administrator grac...@canisius.edu Canisius College ITS Buffalo, NY http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/graciem_public_key.gpg ** 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/. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] College deals with wireless issues
It is close to the entry-level by Cisco. WAP4410N is an AP that is POE without being a router. Price is around $150.00 I believe. We used them when initially expanding our wireless from Extreme 300 APs. We still have some in smaller areas as we fully transition from Cisco to Ruckus. Harry Rauch Sr. Network Analyst Eckerd College 4200 - 54th Ave S St. Petersburg, FL 33711 On 11/11/11 12:40 PM, Matthew Gracie wrote: On 11/11/2011 11:58 AM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote: If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive non-wired coverage using $40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their own $40 AP. Actually, you can do that. Those cheap $40 access points can be easily reconfigured to act as a thick access point by just turning off dhcp, setting a static IP in the correct range, and connecting your uplink line to a LAN port rather than the WAN port. Spend about $100 on a nice buffalo that supports dd-wrt with a customized config file ready to load, and you can get something close to a vendor system for less than 1/4 the price. Of course, that means doing a lot of leg work yourself: configuring access points, setting up subnets/zones, multiple ssids, security, and every change means a manual deployment to individual access points. I'd love to see a feature added to dd-wrt that allows polling a config server for those. But the really big thing you give up here is the reporting. You can make up for some of that with existing syslog or gateway reporting tools, but some of the information you'd get from a controller-based solution is just not replaceable. Slightly off-topic, but are there any consumer level APs that support Power-over-Ethernet? That would be the huge sticking point for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Most people haven't run AC to their ceiling data drops. ** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
