On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, Jon Kotek wrote: > Hey all, I have been requested to come up with a proposal for a > customer of mine. They have an office building that leases small > offices with services. They would like to offer net access but > because of the age of the building running cat5 is going to be spendy. > I have recommended possibly using wireless. Now I need to find out > what would the best way to deploy this. The building is VERY old and > because of that there are walls that can be up to 16 inches thick > cement. I would like to know what would the best access points to > deploy and the best authentication to use. There is already some Cat5 > ran through the building so I can hook into them but there also might > be places where I would have to install a repeater. If you haven't done this before, best to hire someone who has, and learn from them. Sounds like a fairly complex installation. That said, you'll need to do a site survey, to figure out what's actually going to block wireless signals. I'm not the world's expert in this or anything, but to do a poor man's survey, you can just grab a Cisco card and whatever AP, and use their 'Site Survey' software (Windows only.. *sigh*).. this'll tell you what type of s/n ratio you're getting to the AP everywhere you go. It's best to do this with the hardware they're planning on buying - if they want cheap-o AP's, then buy a cheap AP and use that. That way, you'll see where you need to place each AP to get optimal signal everywhere in the building. As far as authentication, if they want to spend big bucks, go Cisco. If they don't want to spend big bucks, my personal way of doing it is to take el-cheapo wireless gear and put it all behind a Linux/OpenBSD/pick-your-favorite-IPSec-implementation VPN concentrator. Then, require each client to use an el-cheapo VPN gateway (albeit a Linux/OpenBSD box, or a $150 Linksys VPN router), and that way you've got an IPSec tunnel protecting each of your clients. 'course, there are a million other ways of doin this.. :) -- Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.real-time.com | Fax : (952)943-8500