[791] in resnet
Re: Wireless Access Points
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William M. Taylor)
Thu Feb 7 15:35:45 2002
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-ID: <56191448@dasher.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 15:31:56 EST
Reply-To: punch.taylor@Dartmouth.EDU
From: "William M. Taylor" <William.M.Taylor@Dartmouth.EDU>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
--- Philip Barr of Amherst wrote:
How (if at all) are schools providing physical security for wireless access
points (WAPs) installed in dormitories and other harsh environments?
--- end of quote ---
We were lucky - in residence halls we were able to install access points and
external diversity antennas inside the wood chases that we had installed for our
wired network. The wood chases have a removeable hatch on each floor for access
to the wires. We were able to put the APs and antennas on the inside of the
chases adjacent to the hatch. The 2.4MHz signal passes through wood with only
minor attenuation and the access points we used allow an external antennna which
boosts the signal more than enough to make up for the attenuation of the
enclosure.
Where you have suspended ceilings you could put access points above the ceiling
and hang an external anntenna below the ceiling.
Since an access point costs much more and is more fragile than an external
antenna, a general solution might be to install the access point in a secure
location and expose only the external antenna to the "harsh environment".
Concealed access points do make it inconvenient to check whatever status lights
are on the outside of the access point units. Our experieince with about 450
installed cisco Aironet 350 access points is that, when they fail, they fail in
ways that you know they're failed so you don't need to look at the lights to
decide that something is wrong. Again we were lucky because we had a 5% early
failure rate in some batches of cisco APs which would have made for a lot of
work if we had to look at the lights on the access point to diagnose a failure.
punch taylor
Dir Tech Services (ret)
Dartmouth College
___________________________________________________
You are subscribed to the ResNet-L mailing list.
To subscribe, unsubscribe or search the archives,
go to http://LISTSERV.ND.EDU/archives/resnet-l.html
___________________________________________________
