We try to work with the vendors and groups to accommodate them within the existing infrastructure. We have had to create a few different VLANs for things like Crestron room controls, but this is handled by RADIUS attributes; whether you're a faculty member with a laptop or an AV control panel or a wireless VoIP handset, you get set up with WPA(2) the same way and the same SSID, but based on your credentials or MAC address you may end up getting punted into a different VLAN on the wireless controller. This is transparent to the user. It is, however, a bit of a maintenance headache. Still, we've managed to keep our list of SSIDs down to two; one unencrypted and one WPA/WPA2 one (USF and USF-GOLD).
Particularly troublesome are all those *cough*Apple*cough*game consoles*cough* applications that are designed for home use and use UPnP and broadcast / multicast based discovery assuming all the other devices they need to communicate with are on the same broadcast domain. We've had to partition our wireless networks into multiple subnets just because of scale, and there doesn't seem to be a good way of dealing with this issue. -- Toivo Voll Network Administrator Information Technology Communications University of South Florida -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Dickson Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 11:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] custom wireless networks on campus Wondering if anyone has established policies, processes or procedures for working with (responding to) vendors, groups and departments on campus who have highly specialized wireless requests (err, demands? needs?) Saying "no can do" might encourage creation of broad scale rogue wireless networks. Bending to every whim could result in ssid overload, PCI compliance verifications and maintenance-update race conditions (MAC tables for hundreds of sensors). ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
