Hear, hear! I can see the handwriting on the wall from Cisco along with everyone else, but we've got over 700 APs, mostly based on IOS (there's still some VxWorks out there) and our stuff works pretty well. We use small cells fixed at the highest data rate so "self-healing" isn't really much use to us and honestly, the MTBF on AP hardware is so much lower than outages due to power it doesn't matter much anyway.
I was gonna buy a WLSE to help with rogue detection but came to realize I don't care that much about RF rogue detection anyway - we don't have the staff to run around with "geiger counter" apps to track them down, so I can't find their LAN MAC to shut down the port the information is not too useful. I guess at the end of the day I still trust hands on real world observations and measurements by experienced engineers more than I do software guesses about what's right. That having been said, if someone can demonstrate more consistently reliable service via a dynamic RF environment orchestrated by controllers than a well-designed static one I'm all for it. Lord knows survey data is stale by the time you get back to your office with it. Happy holidays all, John John J. Brassil | Network Engineer, Vanderbilt Data/Video Engineering voice 615.322.2496 > -----Original Message----- > From: Dale W. Carder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 3:23 PM > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Cisco Self-Healing- does it work? > > > Maybe I just wasn't clear enough not to start a debate! > > I guess I'm just coming from the crusty old engineer approach of: > 1) Identify problem > 2) Identify solution > > What problem are looking to solve with "Self-healing"? Is it > worth it? > > I would be very interested in what you find about how it > reports what it detects plus what it's doing about it so that > the operational staff knows exactly what is going on. Does > it push information via syslog, snmp trap, etc, or do you > have to query it? Is it actually doing the right thing? How > do you manage and maintain it? How can it be integrated with > your other systems? > > I also hope to steer away any .edu from WLSE/WLSM who hasn't > already deployed it. As others have noted, it is doomed. > > When Rusty, myself, and others from our group went about our > wireless redesign, we really did take a pessimistic approach. > We are holding off to a large extent on wireless > infrastructure features until the market shakes out a bit more. > > This is also why we chose the heavyweight IOS AP's. We > already have tools to manage a few thousand IOS devices. > Throw in a thousand+ IOS AP's into that system and we can > utilize the same backend tools we already have developed for > configuration management, code upgrades, monitoring, etc. We > did get Airwave for better user reporting. Then after the > depreciation cycle in two years or so from now, begin to take > a look at what the various thin AP controllers can do at that time. > > Effectively dealing with voice, qos, crypto, fast roaming, > client side supplicants, scalability and resiliency of > controllers, integration with cell phones, etc., all needs to > come a long way. > > Dale > > ---------------------------------- > Dale W. Carder - Network Engineer > University of Wisconsin at Madison http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at > http://www.educause.edu/groups/. > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
