Richard, We have a campus-wide Meru 802.11n wireless network in place with 802.1x as part of the picture. Our experience matches yours. I have believed it was our combination of WPA2-Enterprise and 802.1x that accounted for the inability of older drivers to work with our implementation. We do run a "guest" network that is not encrypted and I believe that we have not seen the same issue for those clients.
We urge people to use the Windows Update site using the "Custom" option and installing any wireless drivers that pop up. We keep the current Intel drivers on a USB memory stick that hangs next to the help desk service window. We have used it many times. Happily that install is extremely simple -- just click on one executable, wait a short time while the updated driver installs and becomes active. We have found that Windows default network settings don't match our needs. Some students follow a short step-by-step guide. Most bring them into the help desk. If we weren't under 1,000 students I would definitely look into the automated client configuration tools that have recently been mentioned here. I wonder if those tools also handle driver updates. Ken On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:24 AM, R. Smit <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > > > I have a question for other Universities who are using Meru wireless > 802.11n networks. We are in the process of doing a Proof of Concept on > Meru’s technology of single cell architecture. We ran into a few issues and > I was wondering how other universities are dealing with these kind of issues > or maybe they didn’t experience any issues at all. > > > > We noticed that clients with older drivers were unable to connect to the > Meru network but after updating the drivers it worked fine. For example > Intel 3945ABG chipset needed the 12.x driver to connect. So the default > driver in Microsoft Vista is out dated. We have about 40,000 students and > they all have their own laptop. Does anyone had to deal with this kind of > problems? And how did you manage it in a large environment? > > Does anyone experience that Meru is very demanding on client configuration > and driver and hardware versions? > > > > Thanks. > > > > Regards, > > > > Richard Smit > Hogeschool van Amsterdam > University of Professional Education > > > > > ********** 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/.
