Now that students are back, we have realistic signal conditions to work with (vs. empty buildings in the summer). As a result, we’re adding tons more WiFi in the dorms tuned more to the dynamics of populated buildings…

Trust me, its a challenge and if anything, we’re working even harder than summer with all the other normal start of the year issues to still juggle.

So, tuning, tweaking and debugging… but we’re steadily getting there.

Attached is a photo from a few minutes ago. CB is feeding cable to Jeff who is pulling it down 4+ floors here in Manson. Naturally, Im running around taking these photos and checking signal strength from my iPhone. :)

- Aaron

Over the last week or more, small subsets of the student population have begun arriving (athletes, RAs, etc). This past weekend the entire incoming class arrived in a matter of hours and, starting today, our returning students are rolling in like a conquering army.
It’s crunch time for the network and thus begins the next round: [...]

This is just a quick post. I’m too tired to write much and have many details to share later when I’ve had time to compose my thoughts. As of tonight, though, we can pretty well declare the student-centric and academic spaces complete. Sure, there will be adjustments to make and possibly more WiFi units to [...]

We’ve covered a HUGE amount of ground on the wired side, so the push in the last few days has been heavily slanted toward revisiting those areas and blanketing the campus with WiFi.
One thing I’ve come to love about these new Meraki WiFi units we’re installing is their enormous range. The signal footprint has been [...]

I just realized that everything tackled in the last 36 hours starts with the letter ‘G’.
Guion is now fully WiFi’d. It only took seven of the dual-radio Meraki’s to do the entire building: two per floor and one extra for the Engineering area. Guion is now fully “green” on the chart.
The [...]

A lot of ground has been covered in the last week. Since last I wrote, Fletcher has been completed on all floors (including WiFi), Patteson House is totally done, and the wired upgrade is now complete in Benedict, Pannell, Gray and Babcock.
Babcock was the last of the larger academic spaces and, best I can tell, [...]

Well, I’m happy to say that the weekend plans I mentioned in my previous post have come to pass. Last night I installed all of the switching gear for the two lower floors of Benedict (which includes the Benedict Lab) and added WiFi for the lab floor. I’ll follow this up with the upper floors [...]

Between Saturday and yesterday I managed to get all four closets in Guion redone. This means that Guion is now fully upgraded in terms of the wired network and the WiFi pieces will be going in probably next week. The main closet on the ground floor of Guion is the largest single stack of switches [...]

During the last week, Jeff and I have spent countless hours standing in front of network equipment racks installing thousands of patch cables of varying lengths, colors and styles. It’s fairly repetitive (and frequently quite tedious), so you get into a rhythm after a bit. This is usually a one-person activity due to space constraints [...]

This is just a quickie update that, as of last night, the new WiFi system is now active in the library. The signal seems to cover all of the public areas (minus the stacks on the lower floors) and I’ll be adding a second unit this week just to make sure every square inch is [...]