We have currently expanded our wireless coverage on our campus to include most of our residence halls. Our wireless network infrastructure consists of HP Procurve 420 access points throughout most of our campus and we are using RADIUS MAC authentication (no additional encryption) to place wireless users (academic and students) in the proper VLAN when they connect to our University wireless SSID (UMNET).
Problem: Our student wireless network VLAN is being flooded with broadcast traffic (mostly ARP requests). Because of this, we suspect, we are starting to experience intermittent connectivity with other wireless users. In particular, what is happening is that when a user attempts to connect to our HP 420 access points, MAC authentication ensues and our RADIUS server (FreeRADIUS) gives the proper information to the access point to place the wireless client into the proper VLAN. Unfortunately, the HP 420 is not placing the client into the proper VLAN and instead is placing the client into the default VLAN for the SSID. We are not experiencing this problem with our older Cisco access points on campus. We have been working with HP about this issue but they do not believe that the flooding broadcast traffic on the student wireless VLAN is causing the problem. Questions: 1. Does anyone else out there believe that the flood of broadcast traffic on our student wireless VLAN could be causing the intermittent connection problem described above? 2. Are there any suggestions on controlling the wireless broadcast traffic from our students? Any suggestions anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, D. Michael Martin, Jr. Network Administrator University of Montevallo ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
