!!Advice Please!! - Primary School Wireless Solution - connectivity problems???

[ICTteach]

Hi,

 

First time user of edugeek - would really appreciate any help and advice. My new school has a wireless solution in place which has 12 AP's and is controlled by a wireless controller (thinking netgear). The school is an old three storey double sided victorian building. The school has 60 netbooks and 30 laptops all accessing the wireless network at different times during the day. The server is running Microsoft Server 2003 and the server is approximately 6 -7 years old. The pupils/staff log onto the the network via roaming profiles and all have individual log ons. The school is located in London and has recently switched from synetrix broadband services to VMB services via LGFL 2.0 connection.

 

The problems:

 

Classes of children can take up to 20 minutes to access the network. This is far from ideal when you are teaching as you want instantaneous access.

Staff members have long waits before logging on via netbooks/laptops

 

 

What can be done to improve the time take for pupils logging on to network via wireless device?

 

How can the signal strength be improved across the school?

 

What reliable companies geared at providing wireless solutions can do carry out this work?

 

 

Thank you

 

ICTteach

[twin--turbo]

How long does it take just one laptop on an evening?

 

What happens if the laptop is hard wired?

 

What does the Wi-Fi Consist of?

 

As Jonny Five says "need More Input"

 

Rob

[TechSupp]

Had long logins with ours, Ruckus but that was down to rather large profiles not Ruckus. Started to standardise the profiles and make everyone mandatory which improved things. Just changed over to W7 with redirected everything so will see how that goes. Make sure you got good switches as no point everything going through a 100 switch if everyone is trying to pull down large profiles over wifi.

[ICTteach]

How long does it take just one laptop on an evening?

 

What happens if the laptop is hard wired?

 

What does the Wi-Fi Consist of?

 

As Jonny Five says "need More Input"

 

Rob

 

Literally have just started ICT audit at school. Wired network seems quick and has no direct connection problems. Wifi consists of 12 PoE Access points located at different positions around the school, controlled by wireless controller. Laptop in the evening - have no idea - but will try on Monday. Not a network engineer, so only know basics. I'm assuming they are all broadcasting from same SSID. I was thinking of carrying out a wireless heat map of the school. Do you know any companies that can do this?

 

Thanks

[ICTteach]

Had long logins with ours, Ruckus but that was down to rather large profiles not Ruckus. Started to standardise the profiles and make everyone mandatory which improved things. Just changed over to W7 with redirected everything so will see how that goes. Make sure you got good switches as no point everything going through a 100 switch if everyone is trying to pull down large profiles over wifi.

 

Thanks for this - I will look at profile size when get into school on Monday. I think there is a problem with this as it would suggest that as 440 pupils all have individual profiles with their own documents this may cause a problem? Is that normal?

 

Who installed your Ruckus solution?

 

THanks

[twin--turbo]

Thanks for this - I will look at profile size when get into school on Monday. I think there is a problem with this as it would suggest that as 440 pupils all have individual profiles with their own documents this may cause a problem? Is that normal?

 

Who installed your Ruckus solution?

 

THanks

 

If they have their files/folders on the desktop then the profiles could be HUGE!

 

 

What controller/AP is it , Monitoring it's status during peak times may give some insight.

 

Rob

[glennda]

Literally have just started ICT audit at school. Wired network seems quick and has no direct connection problems. Wifi consists of 12 PoE Access points located at different positions around the school, controlled by wireless controller. Laptop in the evening - have no idea - but will try on Monday. Not a network engineer, so only know basics. I'm assuming they are all broadcasting from same SSID. I was thinking of carrying out a wireless heat map of the school. Do you know any companies that can do this?

 

Thanks

 

Get an Android device or Windows Laptop and walk around using Either the Meraki Stumbler or Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector.

 

To be honest the biggest problem here is probably pulling down of profiles across the Access Point.

 

Is each AP running 100mb or 1Gbs connection?

[ICTteach]

Get an Android device or Windows Laptop and walk around using Either the Meraki Stumbler or Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector.

 

To be honest the biggest problem here is probably pulling down of profiles across the Access Point.

 

Is each AP running 100mb or 1Gbs connection?

 

I think they are 100mb.

 

So basically have it so the profiles are standardised and the pupils cannot store information on them. Is that correct

 

Thanks for the help

 

ICTteach

[Oaktech]

we have roaming profiles, but student desktops are locked down via GPO to a standard based on year group and they are unable to put things on them - this means our Unifi AP's are able to log a class of 30 laptops on in a matter of 2-3 minutes, we find they are slowest at log off time. We are however an RM network.

[twin--turbo]

I think they are 100mb.

 

So basically have it so the profiles are standardised and the pupils cannot store information on them. Is that correct

 

Thanks for the help

 

ICTteach

 

Mandatory profiles are a good way of reducing profile issues but they do have their drawbacks.

 

As a starting point.

 

Creat a fresh clean unabused user and compare the login between them and a pupil that has issues.

 

Rob.

[witch]

we have roaming profiles, but student desktops are locked down via GPO to a standard based on year group and they are unable to put things on them - this means our Unifi AP's are able to log a class of 30 laptops on in a matter of 2-3 minutes, we find they are slowest at log off time. We are however an RM network.

 

We have this too but in both schools the networks are vanilla. Log on isnt quite as quick - about 5-7 mins but it isn't at all bad.

[ICTteach]

Mandatory profiles are a good way of reducing profile issues but they do have their drawbacks.

 

As a starting point.

 

Creat a fresh clean unabused user and compare the login between them and a pupil that has issues.

 

Rob.

 

Thanks - i will do this Monday

[ICTteach]

We have this too but in both schools the networks are vanilla. Log on isnt quite as quick - about 5-7 mins but it isn't at all bad.

 

 

Thanks for your input and advice

[alttab]

Hi,

 

First time user of edugeek - would really appreciate any help and advice. My new school has a wireless solution in place which has 12 AP's and is controlled by a wireless controller (thinking netgear). The school is an old three storey double sided victorian building. The school has 60 netbooks and 30 laptops all accessing the wireless network at different times during the day. The server is running Microsoft Server 2003 and the server is approximately 6 -7 years old. The pupils/staff log onto the the network via roaming profiles and all have individual log ons. The school is located in London and has recently switched from synetrix broadband services to VMB services via LGFL 2.0 connection.

 

The problems:

 

Classes of children can take up to 20 minutes to access the network. This is far from ideal when you are teaching as you want instantaneous access.

Staff members have long waits before logging on via netbooks/laptops

 

 

What can be done to improve the time take for pupils logging on to network via wireless device?

 

How can the signal strength be improved across the school?

 

What reliable companies geared at providing wireless solutions can do carry out this work?

 

 

Thank you

 

ICTteach

 

there are potentially a number of issues at play here. as others have mentioned roaming profile size would probably be one. Under windows 2008 with win7 it's easy enough to go with redirected folders and have nothing but local profiles with GPO set to clear local profiles after 30 days? i think. Under windows 2003/xp you'd be looking at something like delprof if you were to go the local profile route or as witch mentioned mandatory profiles, both should be coupled with folder redirection.

 

The issue you have with your wireless is that it is a shared medium, you don't have 100mbps full duplex for each client to pull down large profiles. Wireless by it's nature almost forces one to redesign, whereas 100mbps+ switched networks allows you to get away with all sorts of stuff. so design to keep things lean.

 

And even without profiles depending on what's happening during start and post-login you could potentially have a lot of network communication going on and each client contending for shared bandwidth. Often wireless that's designed primarily for coverage has situations where a single AP is used to provide coverage to two rooms.

 

This isn't ideal if you have clients with thick victorian walls on the other side of an AP with the 'strongest' signal or worse if you have a room which has the physical characteristics that demand an AP in the room but there isn't one!!! Especially if you have non-enterprise AP's on the other side.

A good starting point if fixing the profile issue doesn't improve end user experience would be to get to the bottom of how your managed wireless works and optimises as far as it's control characteristics. Another starting would be to look at the type of wireless NICs you have in your end user devices and how they can be optimised [difficult if you've got cheap as chips NICs that don't take advantage of all the cleverness and high specs of modern managed AP's].

 

ultimately you best is to manage expectations, your client server and network architecture should be architectured as such for a worst case scenario that each user can only be able to obtain single digit MB/s -. Sure in theory your AP can take advantage of multiple radios and on paper provide 450Mb/s and your clients might say they're connected at 140Mb/s or whatever but this is real world where the AP just cannot physically dedicate 100meg to each client during the duration of it's login -many portable devices don't even have the hardware to connect at close to those advertised speeds anyway, unlike what even a decade old Fast ethernet switch and 10/100 network cards can do for instance. The important thing is to try and provide a good experience rather than expect to do on the wireless the same stuff that's done on the wired. Roaming profiles are bad enough on the wired, it can be tear your hair out stuff on wireless.

Edited August 31, 2012 by alttab

[twin--turbo]

Hopefully the controller will also be controlling overlapping channels and power levels, and the wifi will be installed so that an area that expects high utilisation spreads it over more than one AP.

 

60 Laptops on one AP is going to cause a lot of traffic that does not even contain much useful data.

 

Rob

[twin--turbo]

As a jolly aside...

 

When I was in my last year at Secondary school we got a second hand RM186 network, think it was 20 stations. That took 45 minuets to boot and have Cascaid loaded on all the machines. not good for job matching . Was almost quicker to fill in the form and send it in the post to Cascaid...

 

Does that even still exist???

 

Rob

[ICTteach]

there are potentially a number of issues at play here. as others have mentioned roaming profile size would probably be one. Under windows 2008 with win7 it's easy enough to go with redirected folders and have nothing but local profiles with GPO set to clear local profiles after 30 days? i think. Under windows 2003/xp you'd be looking at something like delprof if you were to go the local profile route or as witch mentioned mandatory profiles, both should be coupled with folder redirection.

 

The issue you have with your wireless is that it is a shared medium, you don't have 100mbps full duplex for each client to pull down large profiles. Wireless by it's nature almost forces one to redesign, whereas 100mbps+ switched networks allows you to get away with all sorts of stuff. so design to keep things lean.

 

And even without profiles depending on what's happening during start and post-login you could potentially have a lot of network communication going on and each client contending for shared bandwidth. Often wireless that's designed primarily for coverage has situations where a single AP is used to provide coverage to two rooms.

 

This isn't ideal if you have clients with thick victorian walls on the other side of an AP with the 'strongest' signal or worse if you have a room which has the physical characteristics that demand an AP in the room but there isn't one!!! Especially if you have non-enterprise AP's on the other side.

A good starting point if fixing the profile issue doesn't improve end user experience would be to get to the bottom of how your managed wireless works and optimises as far as it's control characteristics. Another starting would be to look at the type of wireless NICs you have in your end user devices and how they can be optimised [difficult if you've got cheap as chips NICs that don't take advantage of all the cleverness and high specs of modern managed AP's].

 

ultimately you best is to manage expectations, your client server and network architecture should be architectured as such for a worst case scenario that each user can only be able to obtain single digit MB/s -. Sure in theory your AP can take advantage of multiple radios and on paper provide 450Mb/s and your clients might say they're connected at 140Mb/s or whatever but this is real world where the AP just cannot physically dedicate 100meg to each client during the duration of it's login -many portable devices don't even have the hardware to connect at close to those advertised speeds anyway, unlike what even a decade old Fast ethernet switch and 10/100 network cards can do for instance. The important thing is to try and provide a good experience rather than expect to do on the wireless the same stuff that's done on the wired. Roaming profiles are bad enough on the wired, it can be tear your hair out stuff on wireless.

 

 

Thank you for your detailed response. It is very useful. Are there any alternatives to roaming profiles on wireless?

 

Would having more access points improve the situation?

 

I will investigate the local profile route with my network engineers.

 

Thanks again

 

ICTteach

[rbance]

There could be a number of things going on....

 

Make sure that profiles are small...large profiles will cause an issue....

Check what you AV does at startup.....check what else is going on at startup.

 

It can be a number of things, and often it will be by trial and error...

 

I would ask Xirrus to have a look at your school and do a free survey.....I would also look at your servers and network in general..it sounds a little old and in need of refresh...you do not want first class wifi using old infrastructure...it will only resolve the coverage issues possibly...and not performance for the end-user....Nothing less than 1GB per link and to desk...go 10GB at core and to edge if you can afford it...