Update from the road

I know you're all dying to hear what's been going on...and a LOT has happened since my last post on Thursday morning. I'm at the Internet2 Member's Meeting in Arlington, VA this week and will try to make use of what free time I have to check up again.

We met with the Messaging team last week to discuss the impact of the wireless project on DHCP and ADS. The biggest issue perhaps is the need to configured DHCP option 189 on the subnets the APs are on. Option 189 can pass up to 3 IP addresses to the APs which is how the APs figure out which controllers to associate with. The APs hold no configuration through reboot. Each time they boot, they will learn the IP addresses of the primary and backup controller via DHCP option 189 and will contact the controller to get their configuration.

The engineering team met on Friday morning. The primary topic was nailing down a tentative schedule, especially for the early part of the deployment. We plan to allow 1-2 weeks of testing after the equipment arrives. Then we want to deploy around 200 APs and let them "burn-in" for a couple of weeks before starting deployment in earnest. In addition to testing, these first 200 APs (about 7 buildings) will give us a chance to document and verify the deployment procedures, so we can move quickly and smoothly with the remaining buildings. We're tentatively scheduling the first 7 buildings during the week of May 12th with full-scale deployment starting the first week of June.