Splitting our the vlans per dorm as you have suggested increases the 
configuration and management complexity in a centralized controller environment 
and can present roaming challenges where dorm users can hear each other.

Bruce Osborne
Wireless Network Engineer
IT Network Services

(434) 592-4229

LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011


________________________________
From: Holland, Ryan C. [holland....@osu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: iOS devices on wireless

Bruce is correct in that each residence hall could be placed on its own vlan, 
thus enabling L2 protocols such as bonjour. I believe Bruce's argument is vlan 
pooling allows for easier operational administration (e.g., can easily increase 
capacity by adding to the pool).

Both are true statements. It comes down to operational requirements versus 
customer requirements, and each university will have their own philosophy on 
how to balance that.

==========
Ryan Holland
Network Engineer, Wireless
Office of the Chief Information Officer
The Ohio State University
614-292-9906   holland....@osu.edu<mailto:holland....@osu.edu>

On Jun 23, 2011, at 8:32 AM, Osborne, Bruce W wrote:

Jeff,

Large wireless subnets increase airtime consumed by broadcast traffic. That is 
why we use a VLan pool of /23 subnets.

The clients are distributed automatically based on a hash of the mac address & 
the number of subnets in the pool, so we cannot easily control which subnet a 
user gets.

Changing the number of subnets in the pool recalculates everybody's subnet too, 
so we make sure we have plenty of capacity.


Bruce Osborne
Wireless Network Engineer
IT Network Services

(434) 592-4229

LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Sessler [mailto:j...@scrippscollege.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: iOS devices on wireless

Bruce,

You could, by any number of technical solutions, ensure that students within a 
given residential space were all on the same L2 network. That is to say, if a 
given residence hall is made up of 200 students, then it's not technically 
difficult to ensure all the residential wireless devices within that area are 
placed in the same VLAN. Or, at a minimum, to ensure that a user's device(s) 
will always be in the same L2 network so that they can see each other. If one 
can't do that, then I wouldn't consider the wireless solution to be very 
flexible, especially given the trend in devices wanting/needing to talk to each 
other.

On my campus, students spend four years of their life in what we consider a 
residential setting, and it seems only logical to me that the experience 
should, to the extent possible, mimic home life. That is, it's reasonable to me 
to expect a student's wireless devices to see each other, and that they should 
be able to share/collaborate with the other users within their residential hall.

I know that if I was back in college, I'd expect that level of functionality, 
and If it wasn't there, I'd probably make it happen using my own gear... 
exactly what you don't want happening.

Jeff


"Osborne, Bruce W" <bosbo...@liberty.edu<mailto:bosbo...@liberty.edu>> 
6/22/2011 4:55 AM >>>
We here at Liberty University have about 8000 students in our residences, the 
vast majority using wireless.

That would be a *huge* L2 network.

Bruce Osborne
Wireless Network Engineer
IT Network Services

(434) 592-4229

LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
40 Years of Training Champions for Christ: 1971-2011

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Sessler [mailto:j...@scrippscollege.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 3:05 PM
Subject: Re: iOS devices on wireless

Mike,

I take it you are not able to reference housing data and then place all 
students/student devices from the same residential hall into the same VLAN?

Jeff

Michael Dickson <mdick...@nic.umass.edu<mailto:mdick...@nic.umass.edu>> 
6/21/2011 11:18 AM >>>
On Jun 21, 2011, at 2:04 PM, Jeffrey Sessler wrote:

My belief is that a student should be able to have a similar experience when in 
a residential hall as they would at home. That requires supporting everything 
under the sun including Bonjour.

Unfortunately our enterprise network is sufficiently different enough that the 
user cannot have a similar experience as they would at home.

At home all of their devices are segregated in an L2 network. All their 
neighbors devices are in their own L2 network, etc. They can browse and 
discover all the devices in their house but not (hopefully) the devices in 
their neighbors. Here at UMass their L2 domain is huge and includes mostly 
unknown devices. Plus, thanks to vlan pooling, it is likely that all of their 
devices are not in the same L2 subnet.  So the "similar to home" experience is 
not a reality for us.

Personally I think students should not think of an enterprise network as 
similar to their home network. That's a dangerous concept given most students 
turn on every sharing feature and protocol they can find at home - with 
relative (L2) protection from the outside world - in an effort to make all of 
their music and videos work in harmony across all devices.

My understanding is that Bonjour only discovers devices at L2, not across L3. 
If that is correct and our enterprise wireless network offers no less than a 
dozen L2 networks per SSID in a vlan pool configuration (Aruba), then users 
aren't discovering their devices in most cases anyway.

-Mike
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