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Mission:

To create a robust, reliable, wireless and wired network at LMN for members, guests and space owned equipment.


Considerations:

  • The network must be easy to use
  • The configuration must be accessible, and understood by more than one member
  • The guest network must be separated from the members network

Questions that need to be addressed:

(Educated guesses are okay here)

  1. How many machines live in the space?
    • Can any of these machines be hard wired?
  2. How many members will be connecting at one time?
  3. How many guests might be connecting at one time?
  4. How big of a space will each access point cover reliably?
  5. What kind of environmental problems will we be challenged with?
    • metal stud walls
    • concrete walls
    • large metal machines
    • electrically noisy machines
    • etc.
  6. What kind of throughput would we like to provide on our network?
  7. What is our realistic max budget?
  8. Will we need a smart switch or wired router of some sort with manged firewall?
  9. Can we provide a wireless guest network that is completely firewalled from the wireless and wired network using the same access points.
  10. Can we prevent guest users from plugging in a machine into a wired connecting and being on the private network?
  11. Can we allow them to be on the guest network until providing the mac address or something to an authorized private network list?
  12. Can / Should this authenticate with LDAP and give each LMN member an account in a central location that can be used for various services?
  13. Can the guest network be dumped to an Intro to LMN page and have free roam on the LMN wiki without any extra authentication?
  14. Will we allow VPN connections from outside the building into the member only network?

Items to research:

    • What can PacketFence do?
      • BYOD - Let people bring their own devices
      • Provide guest access
      • Role-based access control
      • Perform compliance checks
      • Eliminate malware
      • Simplify network management
      • WiFi offload / hotspot
    • Suggested by a network admin of a small community college
    • Cost is around $700 for a 3 pack of routers