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unknown
Nov 16, 2002
Ain't got no stinking title yet!


(Edit: The discussion is turning into a general megapost, so I've updated the first post with links to major makers' sites, and will update with other general info links as they get posted in the thread.)

Wireless in the enterprise used to be just the combination of lots of smaller/low grade gear possibly with some kind of server that controlled who had access. You didn't (hopefully) attach it directly to your network, but many did. You ended up changing the password on the gear every so often as someone gave out the password at the local food court that happened to be within range.

Now there's lots of choice out there and some with excellent management systems and QoS across all stations. But what are those choices?

Major companies I've identified are:


Any info and comments you might have would be awesome!

unknown fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Apr 30, 2015

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Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011
We use Juniper (then Trapeze). It works well enough and in the three years I've had it I recall no issues that weren't our own fault.

If I were looking now from afresh Ubiquiti would be the first stop on my list simply because of the low cost and seemingly rave reviews.

feld
Feb 11, 2008

Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman

I hope Mikrotik can do this in 7.x release of RouterOS. Right now your only option for doing this on your 'Tik or simply on a budget with them would be to build a standard configuration for all devices and then when you want to change the password or something you have to use clusterssh or a script to login and update the pw for all.

Then again, you could be using WPA2 enterprise so you don't *need* this functionality as much... but still... having it centralized is nice if you have a lot of access points.


I'm interested in hearing what people like these days. I touched a Cisco setup years ago and hated it.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
I am totally impressed with Unifi from Ubiquity. It's super inexpensive for the feature set.

madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari
Meraki is also pretty great. It uses a "cloud" controller, you manage everything through the website. Lots of different APs/feature sets, based on what you need. I've deployed it several times and I'm very satisfied with it (I also sell Aruba and Juniper/Trapeze, and prefer Meraki). They also have some great free tools for wifi mapping:

http://tools.meraki.com/mapper
http://tools.meraki.com/stumbler

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Anyone ever used any Ruckus gear before?

Wonder_Bread
Dec 21, 2006
Fresh Baked Goodness!
I am actually glad this thread came up, right now we're using a three Cisco 1131 units. At the moment we're using WPA2-Personal with a single SSID.

Once I fix our backbone network I'm looking to roll out VLANs and have an employee setup using WPA2-Enterprise alongside a WPA2-Personal guest network, but not quite sure what the best way to go about this is. I'd rather not buy one of the $1k+ controllers, but if it's what we have to do then it is what it is.

e: holy poo poo, this UniFi stuff looks really awesome and ridiculously cheap. Maybe I should junk the Cisco... Does it do WPA2-Enterprise?

Wonder_Bread fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jan 16, 2012

Weird Uncle Dave
Sep 2, 2003

I could do this all day.

Buglord

Mierdaan posted:

Anyone ever used any Ruckus gear before?

Yes, and I wasn't happy. The RF performance was alright, but support was terrible. One of their firmware updates bricked a radio, and since we only had a basic support agreement (that only covered firmware updates) they wouldn't talk to me about how they bricked a radio without us going to a different (and more expensive) support agreement. We just tossed the drat things in the dumpster and put up a couple of Ubiquiti Rocket M5s.

CrazyDutchie
Aug 5, 2005
We're working with Cisco Wireless Lan Controllers (WLC) linked together in a WCS (Wireless Control system) in combination with Aironet 1250 and 1260 AP's.
It is truly great, although it probably costs a bit more thatn other vendors. If you need features like H-REAP, Guest access and dynamic power settings, I don't think it can be beaten.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Wonder_Bread posted:

e: holy poo poo, this UniFi stuff looks really awesome and ridiculously cheap. Maybe I should junk the Cisco... Does it do WPA2-Enterprise?
yes. Seriously my only compaint is that it doesn't support 802.3af, so you have a buy a second power injector piece if you want them to be poe.

CuddleChunks
Sep 18, 2004

adorai posted:

I am totally impressed with Unifi from Ubiquity. It's super inexpensive for the feature set.

One warning - their current controller system is designed to work with a single site. If you want to control a second site you need to build a new box (or create a new VM) to host that controller instance. They have had this feature request made very very plain to them and hopefully this will get rectified soon. At the moment, that can be a dealbreaker if you want to roll this out over multiple sites but for lighting up a single office you shouldn't have any problems.

Maniaman
Mar 3, 2006
Does UniFi have to have its "server" on 24/7, or is it only required to provision APs? Got a couple sites that need covered with wireless. UniFi looks amazing (and the price is right), I just don't want to have to leave another PC running 24/7 to handle them if I don't have to.
e: looks like you don't have to have the unifi controller running 24/7 unless you want to use the hotspot features


I have a church that is wanting to look into offering wifi. There's enough brick walls and distance that you'd probably need 2 access points. Would be nice to be able to do QoS. They don't have a huge budget, so I'm going ot see about setting them up with OpenDNS for some content filtering. I'd like to putit on a separate subnet from the wired network. Is UniFi a good choice, or is there something else that would work better with only needing 2 APs? POE is not required, but would be nice.

Maniaman fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Jan 17, 2012

sizerp
Dec 3, 2003
t3h pwn
Anybody do a large Aruba deployment in the recent past? Experiences?

Weiz
Dec 12, 2003
Fishman is not just an understanding financial organisation.

Weird Uncle Dave posted:

Yes, and I wasn't happy. The RF performance was alright, but support was terrible. One of their firmware updates bricked a radio, and since we only had a basic support agreement (that only covered firmware updates) they wouldn't talk to me about how they bricked a radio without us going to a different (and more expensive) support agreement. We just tossed the drat things in the dumpster and put up a couple of Ubiquiti Rocket M5s.
Yeah same here, it was just plain scum. That was years ago so who knows how they are now, but it was enough to put me off them forever.

You could look into Motorola EWLAN stuff, the AirDefence stuff makes people go wow. One point though because my work was somewhat of a trailblazer with the stuff, make sure you can get a free evaluation and make sure it does exactly what it is supposed to because if something doesnt work you will spend forever trying to get someone to care enough to do something about it. :argh: (this is depite winning one of their stupid glass trophies for largest sale in hemisphere/world for that quarter)

Weiz fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Jan 17, 2012

Smoke
Mar 12, 2005

I am NOT a red Bumblebee for god's sake!

Mierdaan posted:

Anyone ever used any Ruckus gear before?

My only experience with their stuff is their wireless bridge solution for multimedia streaming, and everyone I work with hates them. They tend to freak out when there's a power outage and either lose connection with eachother(And the reset procedure is terrible when you have to provide phone support, not to mention that this even happens seemingly randomly as well) or one of the units just decides to randomly die.

No idea if their other products have similar "fun" issues though.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Sounds like I'm glad I didn't test out any Ruckus devices...

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
I work for Motorola (the good one) maintaining the wireless network for Walmart. Our gear is pretty awesome and as somebody mentioned earlier, the AirDefense platform is cool. It's truly something to pop on and track employees walking down the hallways in a distribution center 2000 miles away on the site map.

That being said, I have no idea on what it costs to get involved in Motorola wireless, but I am fairly certain it ain't cheap.

the spyder
Feb 18, 2011
I have been using a handful of Unifi AP's (LR and standard) for a handful of projects and been VERY happy with them. Easy to manage/setup and no issues so far. I am ordering more for our 5 acres and I hope to setup a small mesh network around where the main buildings are. Should cost under $500.

sizerp
Dec 3, 2003
t3h pwn

Jonny 290 posted:

I work for Motorola (the good one) maintaining the wireless network for Walmart. Our gear is pretty awesome and as somebody mentioned earlier, the AirDefense platform is cool. It's truly something to pop on and track employees walking down the hallways in a distribution center 2000 miles away on the site map.

That being said, I have no idea on what it costs to get involved in Motorola wireless, but I am fairly certain it ain't cheap.

If its any indication, from what I've heard, Motorola wireless costs more than Cisco or Aruba - and THEY aren't cheap.

thiscommercialsucks
Jun 13, 2009

by T. Mascis

sizerp posted:

Anybody do a large Aruba deployment in the recent past? Experiences?

The one I did wasn't exactly "large" in the grand scale of things. We used a 620 controller, two AP 92s for the office and four AP 105s for the manufacturing floor. The equipment was fine and supported everything you'd expect for enterprise wireless.

The web interface for the 620 was alright but sometimes wouldn't work properly so I just did everything in CLI after some frustration with the web interface.

The first problem I ran into was the 620 not provisioning some of the APs, I think the 105s. It just refused to push configs to the APs. I fuckin tried everything. Finally I called Aruba and they said "Oh, the version of AOS you're using on the 620 is not compatible with the 105 access points." Ok..? So I had to down/sidegrade to some other version.

Then I ran into a duplex mismatch on the trunk between the 620 and some ADTRAN equipment. I don't know what side caused that. Overall I don't think I was even close to using the equipment to its capabilities or pushing any limits and the experience was fine, and expensive.

stevewm
May 10, 2005

CuddleChunks posted:

One warning - their current controller system is designed to work with a single site. If you want to control a second site you need to build a new box (or create a new VM) to host that controller instance. They have had this feature request made very very plain to them and hopefully this will get rectified soon. At the moment, that can be a dealbreaker if you want to roll this out over multiple sites but for lighting up a single office you shouldn't have any problems.

It seems this is no longer an issue: http://forum.ubnt.com/showpost.php?p=205384&postcount=8

They actually propose putting the controller on a Amazon cloud instance even..

The gist of their post says the controller can be anywhere and can handle multiple sites. Without being on the same broadcast domain, auto discovery doesn't work, so the APs have to be manually told the URL of the controller. Once they have that they will be "adopted" by the controller. They have a few ways of doing this: SSHing to each AP and giving it a command, putting the URL into a DHCP option, setting up a DNS entry, etc...

In the next few weeks I will be setting up these APs for work. We have 8 sites and will probably several APs per site. Given the low cost I don't think it will be a problem getting these approved. :) I'll post back here how it works out.

I just wish Ubiquiti would support real 802.3af PoE on their gear and not the passive PoE they use now.

I've always been impressed with how well their gear works for being such low cost. We have several Nanostation Loco M5s handling backhauls and point to point links for IP cameras. Never had a problem with any of them.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





stevewm posted:

In the next few weeks I will be setting up these APs for work. We have 8 sites and will probably several APs per site. Given the low cost I don't think it will be a problem getting these approved. :) I'll post back here how it works out.

If you don't mind, a review would be awesome. We are looking at doing something for work, as the "several consumer wireless routers running DD-WRT" is getting old.

CuddleChunks
Sep 18, 2004

stevewm posted:

It seems this is no longer an issue: http://forum.ubnt.com/showpost.php?p=205384&postcount=8

Cool, passing this on to my wireless guys.

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

We've got Aruba here, and it's working pretty well. I'm more focused on the deployment side than the administration side, but our admins seem to like it a lot as well - and it's way cheaper than Cisco. AP-135s are somewhat pricey, but they are the top of the line right now. If you don't quite need those, the 125s are great as well.

sizerp
Dec 3, 2003
t3h pwn
We are about to do a big Aruba deployment (2x Aruba 6000s, 250+ AP105s, Amigopods) - we did a small trial of the system (Aruba 2400, 40ish AP105s) and it seemed OK but not terrific - but then I don`t have experience with any competing products.

We are going through all their training courses now before the enterprise-wide deployment, so hopefully that helps me become a little more comfortable with the 10000 things it can do.

What are folks using for corporate or guest authentication schemes? We're trying to sort out if its worth using an external RADIUS server to do machine/client certs or if a simple scheme meets most of our requirements. I think the PKI deployment may not be supportable, at the end of the day - but we're just lab'ing things up again now.

trex eaterofcadrs
Jun 17, 2005
My lack of understanding is only exceeded by my lack of concern.
I just completed a Cisco 5508 WLAN Controller install to a small enterprise (4x AP's ~300 person office) and it was god awful. I don't think I would recommend it to anyone unless you're all Cisco and get awesome deals or something.

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

TRex EaterofCars posted:

I just completed a Cisco 5508 WLAN Controller install to a small enterprise (4x AP's ~300 person office) and it was god awful. I don't think I would recommend it to anyone unless you're all Cisco and get awesome deals or something.

Well I can't speak to the controller aspect of your install, it, doesn't sound like you have enough APs for the amount of people you have.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug

TRex EaterofCars posted:

I just completed a Cisco 5508 WLAN Controller install to a small enterprise (4x AP's ~300 person office) and it was god awful. I don't think I would recommend it to anyone unless you're all Cisco and get awesome deals or something.

Yeah, we've got a 5508 in a ~200 person environment with 13 1131AG APs and I can't say I have any complaints whatsoever. Our buildings are mostly chemistry labs, so the client density isn't as high as it might be in a pure office-worker setting.

trex eaterofcadrs
Jun 17, 2005
My lack of understanding is only exceeded by my lack of concern.

Captain Foo posted:

Well I can't speak to the controller aspect of your install, it, doesn't sound like you have enough APs for the amount of people you have.

The lack of AP's aren't a big deal, honestly. Not all those workers have wireless. It's mostly for guests and execs.

The biggest issue I had was relating to the web auth piece. It's really poorly designed, and their example code comes broken out of the box. It took me an inordinate amount of time to diagnose.

sizerp
Dec 3, 2003
t3h pwn
Just finished taking a few condensed Aruba courses -

- Aruba Mobility Bootcamp
- Aruba Amigopod
- Aruba Airwave Manager
- Aruba Advanced Troubleshooting

Their first level cert (ACMA) is online / you can only register for if you've taken the training (which is ridiculous), but I polished it off, and need to schedule my ACMP shortly. ACMA is definitely NOT CCNA level - its not dead simple ("select all that apply" questions make it more difficult than it would otherwise be) - but I've heard their 'professional' level cert is more in line with the CCNA.

Its strange how obtuse their systems seem before you take the training but how simple they are in reality - the components all just map together strangely (much like the Juniper SSL VLN) but its oddly efficient despite the awful inconsistent UI.

Pudgygiant
Apr 8, 2004

Garnet and black? More like gold and blue or whatever the fuck colors these are

sizerp posted:

Anybody do a large Aruba deployment in the recent past? Experiences?

Around 400 provisioned for 8000 concurrent users last year. I did a lot more of the install and the networking/satcom side than the wireless configuration. Our consultant was a loving retard, but other than that it wasn't so bad. If I had to do it again I'd definitely find a vendor for cables though, making 88 coax in 2 days leads to blindness.

Recessive
Mar 15, 2003

Blah!

Mierdaan posted:

Anyone ever used any Ruckus gear before?

I work almost exclusively with Ruckus. Can't say I've had the same support issues as previous posters, but then I'm pretty sure my company has one of the upper tier support packages. If we identify something we think is a bug with the firmware, we've usually received a call from them within a couple of hours.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
well i ordered some additional ubiquity APs last week, only to find out they are on backorder for at least 6-8 weeks.

Maniaman
Mar 3, 2006
Has ubiquity still not fixed their production issues? Seems like it's always a crapshoot as to if you're going to be able to get their products. Their products are awesome but they're so hard to get.

Weird Uncle Dave
Sep 2, 2003

I could do this all day.

Buglord
No, Ubiquiti still doesn't know the first thing about supply chains. The stock finder on their Web site is sometimes helpful, though; basically they just email all their resellers, and have the ones that have your requests in-stock call you.

ptier
Jul 2, 2007

Back off man, I'm a scientist.
Pillbug

adorai posted:

well i ordered some additional ubiquity APs last week, only to find out they are on backorder for at least 6-8 weeks.

I am finding that, and I am trying to convince my work to switch over. Although I don't think it will be an issue since we had been using http://www.open-mesh.com/ And oh my god do those things suck rear end.

stevewm
May 10, 2005
Many people on the Ubiquiti forums commented that all their previous orders have finally started to ship. And Ubiquiti said all of their distributors should have stock now... Good thing as I am ordering 2 tomorrow for a test setup.

bort
Mar 13, 2003

What's so nice about 'em?

ptier
Jul 2, 2007

Back off man, I'm a scientist.
Pillbug

bort posted:

What's so nice about 'em?

From what I hear... they work.

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pubic void nullo
May 17, 2002


bort posted:

What's so nice about 'em?

Pros: Cheap, functional, flexible, good support, active community, features being added regularly, and they look good. Official SDK for the firmware.
Cons: Supply chain issues, lack of pro tier features (vlan/radius/ipv6, although most of this is coming in future firmware), some reliability issues in the past (some older DoA units, incredibly basic http exploit, self-zapping secondary poe ports on the nanostation)

Basically what you'd expect from a new company trying to disrupt the market (and doing a v. good job)

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