Re: Multi-AP WiFi best practice


<ken@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:gg6si3hr4tjah4rb1bk7s67p8t9iekg2m0@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:52:36 +0000, Andy Burns
<usenet.july2007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 04/11/2007 16:54, TKelly wrote:

If you give me the telephone number for the school I will be happy to
give
them a quote for correcting the system. It will save a lot of time and
effort.
Why have they asked you if you don't know much about computers?

Oh yes, being condescending towards someone is a very good way to get
them to hand one of their customers over to you ...

So, in just a few hours, on a Sunday, I have had some very sensible
suggestions (plus a twat). Thanks to all (bar one - but if the twat's
as knowledgeable as (s)he claims then I suppose they may demonstrate
their ability by posting a constructive suggestion).

Your answers have reinforced what I thought - there's nothing
fundamentally wrong with the setup, but there are probably too many
APs. I will experiment by reducing them and seeing the results.
However politics makes it hard to simply turn some of them off. I will
also try splitting the network, as I suggested in my OP. The only
other users, apart from the notebus, are teachers' laptops - a maximum
of one per room and, in any case, normally connected by Ethernet.

[snip]

As others have suggested, wireless networking has the very severe limitation
that it is in effect a single collision domain for each AP, so having more
than a very few clients per AP per channel will be a serious performance
limitation. This will be especially noticeable if users have roaming
profiles and are allowed to store their documents within the profile - since
each profile can potentially be many tens or hundreds of Mbytes.

The other issue is political. I was involved for a while with a local
school because one of the governors asked me to try to resolve a
similar-sounding problem (a class of students could not all log on at once
at the beginning of a lesson, thereby wrecking any lesson plan that the
teacher had prepared). In this instance all the workstations were connected
via 100 Mbits/sec ethernet and a Gigabit backbone to a reasonably powerful
server, which was clearly not being significantly stressed. But the system
had evolved, rather than been designed. The school managed the budget, but
had nobody with the combination of relevant experience and management
ability to commission work. They bought in the major management service
from a privatised offshoot of what had been the county education authority
computer services department; and while there were some good principles
established in the system much of the everyday detail seemed to be
misguided. One craft technician was left with the responsibilty of
day-to-day mangagement - he had a good idea of the difficulties he faced but
was totally the wrong personality to get anything done.

My recommendation from this experience would be install a gigabit network
throughout and install diskless workstations for student use. Then you
stand a sporting chance of maintaining security and managing updates by
having all the workstations boot from the server via the network.

Also, I wouldn't entertain the idea of laptops anywhere!! I've just heard
of a school where trolleys of laptops were supposed to be locked away in a
secure room when not in use; this room was broken into (while there was a
dance or some such noisy event in progress) and the trolley used to move all
the laptops across the playing field to a waiting vehicle.

I am also very strongly of the opinion that computers add very little to the
chance of pupils actually learning anything - everywhere I've seen them
used, they have simply been a distraction. I doubt that many pupils even
learn they way around the keyboard - I'm sure formal typing lessons would be
more use! The quality of grammar and spelling demonstrated by the students
is abysmal, and there's very little idea of decent presentation of work.
The computer certainly does not show itself as an aid to communication.

I would seriously recommend getting rid of all the computers and buying in a
few more skilled teachers!

-- Graham J




.

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