We are currently expanding our wireless network and by fall semester we will 
have around 2100 AP's.  We have both AP 208's and AP 300's.

We have been very happy with the single channel architecture, but have had the 
same driver issues mentioned by others. Again most issues are easily resolved 
by our help desk getting drivers updated.

-Neil

--
Neil Johnson
Network Engineer
Information Technology Services
The University of Iowa
Work: 319 384-0938
Mobile: 319 540-2081
Fax: 319 355-2618
E-mail: neil-john...@uiowa.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv 
[mailto:wireless-...@listserv.educause.edu] On Behalf Of Clipperton, Ken
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 8:45 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Experiences with Meru

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 <r.s...@hva.nl<mailto:r.s...@hva.nl>> 
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


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