Catching up (again)...

Well, it's been 3 weeks since my last post, but I assure you we have not been sitting around twiddling our thumbs ! Here's a summary of what's been going on...

The wireless and core upgrade projects are moving along smoothly. About 1,000 of the 1,200 APs in Bloomington have been replaced. We're also starting to complete some of the dorms in Bloomington as well - so some of the dorm rooms will have wireless by the start of the fall semester. At IUPUI, we're not quite as far along as in Bloomington, but will have completed wireless upgrades in all the on-campus buildings by the time the UITS change freeze goes into effect on August 18th.

We're finishing up the preparations for adding the "IU Guest" SSID to all the APs. This will be the SSID guests who have been given Network Access Accounts will use to access the network. This will allow us to shutdown our old web portal authentication system. The system has a scaling limitation related to the number of MAC addresses on wireless and we've been putting band-aids in place for 2 years to get it to scale to the number of wireless users we have. The "IU Guest" SSID will use the web-portal authentication built-in to the HP WESM modules - these do not have the same scaling limitations.

With these projects moving along smoothly, Jason and I have shifted our attention to the *next* set of projects. Here's a bit about what we've been up to...

We spent a day at IU-Northwest talking with them about the major network upgrade they're planning. During the next 12 months they'll be upgrading all their wiring to Cat6e, consolidating IDFs, improving their outside fiber plant, upgrading all their switches to HP5400's, and deploying over 150 new 802.11n APs.

Jason spent a day at IU-Kokomo helping them setup their new HP wireless gear and discussing their future use of HP's Identity Driven Management product. IU-Kokomo undertook a major upgrade of their network earlier this year, replacing all their switches with HP 5400's, and as part of that they purchased HP's Identity Driven Management system. I could devote a whole post just to this (and probably will eventually), but essentially this is a policy engine that let's you decide when and where users can connect to your network and what type of network service they get - which is done by placing them on different VLANs or applying ACLs to their connection. We've been interested in getting our feet wet with a system like this for some time and Kokomo has agreed to be a guinea pig of sorts :) Thanks Chris !

We had our yearly retreat with the IT Security Office - now called the University Information Security Office. This is something we've been doing for a few years now. A couple people from ITSO and a couple people from Networks get together off-campus and spend several hours thinking strategically about improving security - instead of the tactical thinking we usually do. Tom Zeller hosted the event again - Tom has a large screened in porch in the woods and we were able to watch some wildlife in addition to discussing security !

We met with the University Place Conference Center staff at IUPUI to discuss their unique wireless and guest access needs. They have web-portal authentication on both their wireless network and their wired network. The new web-portal system on the HP WESMs only works for wireless users, so when we upgrade wireless in the hotel and conference center, we'll have to do a bit of a one-off for them.

I've been very busy preparing for the upcoming MPLS Workshop at the Internet2 Joint Tech's workshop in Lincoln, Nebraska. MPLS VPNs are becoming a hot-button topic for campuses as they struggle to meet the divergent networking needs of their different constituents - from the business aspect of the university, to student housing, to researchers. In fact, we're planning to roll-out MPLS VPNs this fall, so when I was asked to be an instructor for this workshop, I figured it would be a great opportunity to sharpen my skills on MPLS VPNs *AND* I could reuse the materials I develop to provide training for all the UITS networking staff that will need to learn how to support MPLS VPNs ! As part of this process, I put together a small MPLS testlab with 3 routers and, when I return, will use this to start preparing for our MPLS VPN deployment.

We've also continued to develop our plans for networking in the new data center. I'll share some more about later once I get past the Joint Tech's workshop in Lincoln !