Rogelio wrote: > What do others here think of the controllers and back end solutions that > are often "necessary" for various vendors' wi-fi solutions? >
In a large environment with a lot of access points they seem to be essential. Certainly a large amount of network lifting and intelligence is getting moved closer and closer to the edge, but policies / consistent configuration etc still requires some sort of central management solution. I'm in the process of deploying Zeroshell as a back end controller for several access points. The feature list (RADIUS/VPN/LDAP directory etc etc) are certainly things I wouldn't want at the edge. I'm also looking into various NAC solutions (such as Packetfence) and configuration management suites (such as ControlTier). Those aren't things I want my network equipment worrying about. Let the routers/switches/access points do what they were designed to do (route and switch traffic) and move other pieces to general purpose x86 based systems (take your pick of blades/virtualization/physical hardware/appliance). > (I often see people buy two controllers for redundancy, which of course > drives the price way up. Sometimes this seems to be a move by vendors > to create a false demand for the product.) > Well the role that the controller and associated services (ie authentication) play, require redundancy. I don't think its something that is hype. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
