[tech] [ucc] Minutes of Meeting 6th May 2011

[David Adam]

On Fri, 6 May 2011, Conrad Pogson wrote:

> UCC Committee Minutes 06-05-2011
> Meeting opened at 17:08
> 
> Present: [BOB] [LOL] [TPG] [ASH] [DJA] [CJS] [SZM] [EDO] [AHC]
> Apologies: [MRD]
> 
> General Business
> ----------------
> - [DAA] wants to purchase TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND wireless N AP ($75)
>   - [AHC] claims this is 'actually pretty shit' and the 'range is crap'

[AHC] actually recommended this model in a thread on committee@, but all 
intelligent people change their minds from time to time.

>   - Will apparently work inside the room, but not much more.
>   - Difference between this and the old AP, is that OpenWRT wont run on our
>     current AP and it's faster. We will be able to do byte counting on the new
>     AP.
>   - More discussion on tech@ would be good, deferred.

OpenWRT runs on our current AP. What does not run is a wireless driver 
that supports RADIUS accounting i.e. the easiest way to keep track of how 
much traffic people use. So if keeping track of this is important to the 
committee, we need a wireless AP that supports this, which includes many 
(but not all) devices that run OpenWRT, specifically those that use the 
hostapd toolkit.

The TL-WR1043ND has the advantage of having a Gigabit uplink available, 
which means that under ideal conditions the full bandwidth of the 802.11n 
specification would be available.

Other options include the Cisco Aironet 1040/1140-grade kit 
(probably around ~$500+), Linksys WRT160NL (not available new), Ubiquiti 
PowerAP N (no gigabit) or Ubiquiti UniFi AP ($120-165, no gigabit, not 
totally convinced of software support for accounting).

Committee should therefore consider:
 - do we want a new AP that does 802.11n;
 - do we care about accounting for wireless users; and
 - how much money do we want to spend if yes to either of the above?

Dual-band devices (which will offer better performance for some users) are 
definitely more expensive. Finding devices which are both dual-band and 
have Gigabit Ethernet is left as an exercise to the reader.

[DAA]