Hello Mikrotik Community,
We've recently won a contract to setup the network and systems for a new primary school in our town, we're looking at some pretty great kit and a reasonable budget to get this down. The school is split into 4 main buildings, 1xAdmin, Hall, Library, 3x"Pods" which are individual buildings with 8 classrooms each. We'll have a mix of Fibre, DSL and Wireless for uplinks. There will be fibre between all buildings and maybe to the servers too depending on cost. We'll be installing a 2 x 48 Port Layer 3 Gigabit Switches with 2 Fibre ports in each building so there will be a nice backbone between switching equipment
We're thinking of isolating each building into its own subnet and create a VLAN for voice. The Wireless AP's (4 per pod, 1 per classroom) will have both G and N radios. There are 98 Wired points in each pod which will be patched in at all times and 1 PoE port in the roof of each classroom for AP. Currently we're looking at a couple of ways of doing this but would appreciate your wisdom and potential ways to approach this.
1x Total Vendor (D-Link or Allied Telesis) providing Switch, Wireless, Management
or (My preferred, but.... to be researched)
Single Vendor Switching with Mikrotik and a FreeRADIUS / LDAP solution, although we could just use inbuilt Mikrotik Auth and ACL for wireless devices..
We currently run a WISP with just over 85 Hotspots now, so we're getting pretty familiar with Mikrotik Kit in the hotspot sense (each individual radio acting alone with RADIUS to auth). However, I'd be interested to hear some thoughts from the pros on how you might approach this with a Mikrotik Solution.
1. Architecture, How would you approach the switching / segmentation of each Pod?
2. Would you segment it?
3. Is an RB1000 the right tool for a firewall?
4.Is there a Fibre enabled mikrotik beastie?
5. To allow roaming we would be bridging each isolated pod into a Hotspot controller (probably the 1000) What do you think?
6. What features / flaws should we consider whilst working on the initial design.
7. Client devies will be mixed, MAC, Windows, Linux, iPods, WiFi Phones, Other WiFi devices.
I hope there are heaps of questions from the community to help us ask more questions ourselves and think outside the box.
Thanks for your time.