Overview
Last month I was in Canberra at the 2016 Association of Independent Schools ICT Leadership Conference: Workshops by ICT Managers in schools, for ICT Managers in schools. Somerville sponsored the network connectivity again this year and they asked me to implement and maintain it for the conference.
The integrated wired and wireless network was a resounding success, with many positive comments.
Key Stats
- Indoor APs: 21 x instant (325, 225, 205)
- Outdoor APs: 1 x instant 277 (in the water feature – fishtank)
- Wireless management: Central cloud-based platform
- Peak device count: 549
- Highest device count on an AP: 74
- Number of unique devices: 799
- Most heavily utilised AP: IAP-325 in the classroom area (just inside the exhibition hall); Followed by the IAP-325 in the film students’ area
- Switches: 5 (5406R core, 2 x 3800 wiring closets, 2920 + 2915 for local ports)
- Internet Connection: 1Gb synchronous from AARNET
- Highest observed speedtest result on a machine: 786Mbps (wired Apple caching server)
- Common hand-held speedtest result on the delegate wireless network: (about 120-150Mbps each way with a QOS max of 512Mbps)
- Complaints about the wireless or network (not attributable to an end-point): 0
Deployment
The wired and wireless network was built and tested in Sydney, and shipped to Canberra for deployment on Tuesday afternoon, with the first sessions kicking off at 10am Wednesday. The whole system was decommissioned in less than 2hours on Friday afternoon.
The tight integration between the switches and the APs allowed this rapid, automated deployment. The two key elements here were:
- Automatic configuration of ports with APs connected (device-profile)
- MVRP (the updated version of GVRP) to carry multiple VLANs on uplink ports
This is the config for automatic setup of an AP - on whatever port it is plugged in to!
device-profile name "AIS-APs"
untagged-vlan 8
tagged-vlan 11-13
poe-priority high
exit
device-profile type "aruba-ap"
associate "AIS-APs"
enable
exit
Additional Info