How hard is it to setup Meraki?

[robjduk]

I tested out the AP Meraki gives out for attending their talks and seems easy enough but to those who have it, would you set it up from scratch yourself or are there lots of "gotcha's" to look out for and I am better off getting a pro in?

 

My setup is a handful of VLANS, one each for staff, students and guest. I'm told its not that hard.

 

Thoughts please?

Ta

[CadlaM]

Biggest gotcha is the price of ongoing licences. I think you get a year with freebie. They are good though.

[AlanD]

I agree...they are good and their web interface is one of the best...but the ongoing annual costs are difficult to justify when the there are other access points that work just fine - with no annual cloud managed charges.

[mdrabble]

Easy enough to set up- currently using a windows radius server for authentication which works well but need to sort vlans next week (which seems easy enough) and to set smoothwall as dhcp server for wireless Clients otherwise roaming/authentication breaks!

 

Current licences expires in 2018 so may be looking for a different setup depending on cost of licence renewal.

Edited August 9, 2017 by mdrabble

[Sylv3r]

Pretty straight forward. I setup 40 AP's and around 12 switches with no training which includes VLAN's, routing etc and everything was pretty straight forward. The company I bought the kit from specced up 2 days consultancy for around £1,000.00 but I thought I would give it a go first and if it proved too difficult to get them involved - it wasn't necessary in the end.

[CadlaM]

I can believe that. It's pretty straightforward. We did 40 APs and 5 switches without consultants. We also have a 200mtr AP bridge to another building giving close to 40 Mbps LOS connection

[geezersoft]

Web interface is the best in the business. However, a few points.

 

1 Make sure you set your network up on the EU data cloud and not US if GDPR compliance is important to you.

 

2 Make sure you keep backups of all floor plans as Meraki deleted most customers floor plans that were stored in North America last weekend including all mine:(

 

3 if you need radius accounting to authenticate to a third party firewall, do not buy Meraki !!

 

4 buy licenses for at least for 5 years to save money on TCO if you decide Meraki is for you.

[robjduk]

thanks all. Just been screwed over with my install. Apparently supply and install means they will screw them to the ceiling but not set the system up so looks like its up to me. (surprisingly Huge education company).

 

Time to get my tech on!

[geezersoft]

If you need advice setting up Meraki AP I have over 200 so know a few tricks.

[robjduk]

thanks for the help and advice everyone. Just started and I need some ports open just for the AP to see the outside world which my provider is quoting 5 days for...... just epic.