> 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 <[email protected]> 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/.
