Wireless networks questions and input

[tlarkin]

Well,

I have a very large 1:1 laptop deployment I manage with my co-workers. Around 6,000 laptops to be exact. We have so many small quirky roaming problems when clients roam from building to building or from off campus back to campus. A lot of the times the client will fight our controllers which dish out DHCP for their last IP address which the client got off site. This arguing goes on for a bit and finally the client gives up and gets a self assigned IP.

Sometimes it is the keychain that is the problem. Other times it just needs to be power cycled (the airport card) and other times it loses the encryption passkey we use for our WiFi…

We have looked at many methods ran some updates, have our apple enterprise support on the case, and yes there are some issues. Since 10.5.6 Apple did release some airport updates that addressed clients in wide roaming wireless networks. I am not sure the exact details of those fixes but it is on their kbase.

I am at the point now where I am thinking about creating a root owned directory, have it house a few scripts I wrote, then make a launchd item that will run these scripts system wide at boot up. The script will force the airport power on, scan for our SSID (as it currently looks the networksetup binary does not support this, looking into it) and if the SSID is present then connect. The output all log files to secret directory and then delete said log files. Since I am assuming that passkey will be stored in plain text in this root owned folder I am creating so I want to keep it out of the log files.

Then I stumbled upon this…

Wireless installer for the masses…

Which is great but looks a bit complicated.

All clients are Macbooks late 2007 models, all wireless APs are Cisco with Cisco controllers (don’t know the models off hand – I am the mac guy not the Cisco guy here) and DHCP is handled by Linux servers.

What and how are you all implementing wireless at your enterprise networks?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Tom

[tlarkin]

Well,

After some research and deliberations, we are going to try out Aruba at one of the buildings and see how it goes. We got them to come into our infrastructure and drop 6 APs and one controller in to see how it fairs. Talking with their sales engineers it seems that a lot of the problems with the Cisco hardware is that when the Mac beacons from being waken from sleep, there is some sort of communications issue.

After googling the heck out of it and hopping on some mailing lists we are not the only school district/enterprise network that has this issue.

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