Educause-Denver-2012 was a success. Great topics, amazing Weather, great audience, and even good food! The following topics were tackled by the Wireless-LAN group within the 50 minutes assigned.
Here is the report from our meeting. Thank you to Jeffrey Ballentine from UPenn for taking notes during the meeting. •802.11AC Why wait? Why jump? AC is 5Hz only, the first offering will not support Multi user MIMO (the ability to support multiple devices on different streams) and it might take one more year before Multi User MIMO is supported. The group was wondering if vendors were already offering AC devices. As usual with Wi-Fi, consumer APs are first available then enterprise grade. So, no rush on AC as of today. And really Multi user MIMO seems to be the greatest benefit •How to empower users with Bonjour needs (or more generally speaking: mDNS)? Members of the audience are starting to experience demand for support of devices like AppleTV including Remote control and display mirroring. It seems that as time passes, we won't be able to ignore it ;-) -mDNSext, the new IETF proposal, looks to be the only non-vendor specific solution in the pipeline (check Neil Johnson's post on this list for more info) -Otherwise vendor specific solutions range from light control of the multicast traffic to total control, turning Multicast into Unicast and even doing identity based mDNSing (all MAC addresses assigned to a specific user can see each other even in different VLANs which can also address some security concerns if devices are poorly configured) •IP depletion (NAT?, Lease Time?, DHCP server load) It seems that everyone is using NAT with leases from 10 min to 30 min to answer the growth, and one institution doing 1 day leases without issues. Most people do NAT on their Firewall. The issue of logs was raised, but not many concerns there. One institution has a two week retention policy which doesn't overload the log storage at all! •As a side discussion we talked about RADIUS load...and that is definitely something to watch out for! Many members of the audience reported issues. One institution is considering putting RADIUS behind a load balancer •How to Deal with devices that cannot do 802.1x Don't get rid of the NetReg SSID yet it can come to the rescue with non-1x devices Only one institution was doing 802.1x only. And many are doing one dedicated SSID with WPA2-PSK for institution owned devices (Scanners, projectors, etc...) •Location Based Services (e.g. IP printing) No one is using LBS in the audience or has seen a solution that is satisfactory. Do you? •Success Stories with IPv6 on Wi-Fi? Not much traction there. Someone mentioned one example of a faculty that needed to reach an IPv6 only site in Asia and V6 had to be enabled for that purpose Some have V6 enable, but no one has a strategy in place. Remember June 6th is IPv6 day...do something! •Is Wireless management slowly moving to the switch? What does it mean for us? (Will it all work with openflow seamlessly?) Any fear of being locked with one vendor The gartner magic quadrant is now combining Wired and Wireless. Most vendors are offering Wireless and Wired. Controllers can only do so much. A natural evolution seems to push some of the intelligence of Wireless back to the edge. We had to cover that topic really quickly due to lack of time. At Tennessee we see the integration of Wireless and Wired as a good thing to have the "traditional" network engineer been involved in wireless. Find Network Engineers with Wireless expertise is hard, this might address this issue eventually. On the negative side, being locked with one vendor on Wired and Wireless is a deterrent to the adoption of such an architecture. Time will tell! •Outdoor Heat maps Someone in the audience needed the ability to plot outdoor heat maps. No one had an answer for a solution. Do you? Voila! Comments Welcome. Best, Philippe Hanset Univ. of TN, Knoxville www.eduroamus.org<http://www.eduroamus.org> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
