Wireless Water Cooler

A little bit of carryover from my intro thread here, but I am getting ready to set up my capstone project for my last semester in college.  I am a Telecommunications Management major at the University of Nebraska Kearney (a degree now coined Information Networking & Telecommunications Management).  My degree focuses both on the management and technical sides of telecom/networking, the technical coming mostly from the CCNA curriculum.  We are really just starting to get into the academic "meat" of wireless, but I have been fortunate to work with Aruba, HP, and Ubiquiti APs in my internship and employment.

The goal of my project is to explore dynamic VLAN assignment for wired & wireless users, with the VLAN determined by user group on active directory.  So, I thought it might be fun to keep track of my project with the experts here in the community. 

I'm extremely excited to become a part of this community.  The support I have received from Aruba and CWNP has blown me away.  I'm also really looking forward to the learning experience from just interacting with everyone here and reading what you have to say.  My next post (actually written, just breaking it into readable chunks) will detail the setup I have for my LAN & Lab environments.

A little about the lab environment I have set up at home:

My situation is a little unique in that I absolutely have to maintain a working internet connection for my wife.  She's a CPA in the midst of tax season who is lucky enough to be able to work from home.  So "breaking the internet," as she puts it, is not really an option.

The way I have things set up right now:
I have a Cisco ASA as my edge device at the moment, which is fed from a cable internet connection.  The ASA splits into the LAN (wife's side of the network, which she accesses through a consumer-grade Asus access point) and my lab network.

My lab's core switch is an HP 3400cl-24G.  Hanging off of this switch, I have:
     Dell PowerEdge 2950 III running Hyper-V Server 2012.  VMs that are running:
          Server 2012, running AD, DHCP, DNS, File Services, NAP, and a Ubiquiti Controller
          Server 2008 R2 (no roles actively doing anything; I recently blew up and reinstalled this VM)
     Ubiquiti Unifi AP, which will be replaced by the Aruba APs for the duration of this project

The lab network is segmented into 4 VLANs, each assigned a pool in the 172.16.XX.0/24 space, with XX matching the VLAN number:
     VLAN 10: Infrastructure
     VLAN 20: IT Staff
     VLAN 30: Accounting
     VLAN 40: General Staff
Each group also has a AD user group with test accounts assigned (except for VLAN 10, in which the switches, APs, servers, etc reside).  I have RADIUS functioning for

Other notes:

- Sean from Aruba has let me borrow three Aruba IAPs: one 225 and two 115's.  They arrived yesterday!  Thanks Sean!
- I also have 3 Cisco 2650XM's and 3 Cisco 2950s in a small rack that I am using for my CCNA studies that can be thrown into the mix if I get really ambitious.

In the end, I would like to see wired users sign on from the same workstation and be assigned to the appropriate VLAN, with VLANs 30 and 40 only able to access resources on their subnet and their gateway (no management access from these two vlans).  VLAN 20 should be able to SSH/HTTPS to manage infrastructure.

For wireless users, I want users in VLANs 30 and 40 to sign onto the same SSID, receive an appropriate address, and be confined to their subnet and their gateway.  VLAN 20 should again be able to SSH/HTTPS to infrastructure devices.

My university is all Aruba, but I never got to do much more than hang them when I worked in their network department.  I have had more AirWave and controller exposure in the last few months, but I'm definitely looking forward to diving into the guts of what Aruba can do.

So I intended to update this thread with the results of how I went about configuring everything...but to be honest, it was a letdown.  It went way too easy, didn't get a chance to troubleshoot!  

In all seriousness, the IAPs worked flawlessly with my setup, the VLAN binding was smooth as butter, and well....there was nothing to it, really.  There were a lot of features I could have gone into and tried, but for the purposes of my project, and for a basic wireless network setup, I am incredibly impressed at how well it worked.

I owe Aruba big time!

Nice ! :smileyhappy: