"Schmeits, Roger" wrote: > Got a question... > We have a student housing building that has about 40 students. We have been > wanting to wire the building but the cost has always stopped us ($40000). I > have been playing with the idea of using 5 or 6 Cisco aironet 350 access > points and have the students purchase a PCI wireless card for their machine. > For our Internet connection we are in the process of contacting Qwest for a > business line. At this time I do not know at the details for a Internet > connection. Mainly how many IP's we would get, cost, bandwidth, etc.
I don't know how much about wireless. Certainly it's easier, but probably more expensive and maybe less secure (at least you'd have to think about those things). It shouldn't be terribly hard to wire the building yourself, depending on how it's built. I'd be happy to offer advice about that. I would think it would only take a week or less, and less than $4000 in equipment. As for Internet access, if you get DSL from Qwest that's probably the most cost effective connection. I don't know what type of bandwidth you'd need but even going above 256/640k isn't too much. If you do get DSL, the Cisco 678 you'll get will do NAT, DHCP, and packet filtering (a little) for you. You may still have use for a Linux router/firewall box, but you probably don't need static IP addresses. The one dynamic one that comes with basic service will probably do. If you want to run servers, that's a different story, but just to get students on the net you don't need your own block of IPs. I don't see any reason to run your own servers. There are plenty of free email services where students can get accounts (maybe even from the school). If you let the DSL modem do DHCP, you won't have to worry about DNS and such too much. Admittedly I've never done this on this scale, so there may be problems I don't forsee. But I have done some shoestring installs like this before. Dave _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
