Symbol Technologies WS 2000 manual A Field Office Example, Background

A Field Office Example

Chapter 7. A Field Office Example

Background

Leo is the network administrator, system administrator, and IT professional for a field office with 60 employees. The users include sales people, sales engineers, office administration and customer support people. All of the sales personnel have laptops and many of them have personal digital assistants (PDAs).

The office is connected to the Internet and to Corporate through a frame relay link. Between the office network and the frame relay, there is a router and a virtual private network (VPN) appliance. The VPN appliance encrypts all traffic to Corporate. Traffic to other addresses passes straight through.

Leo installed a wireless access point about six months ago and quickly found that many employees preferred to use it. However, the throughput of the lone unit was not enough to service 40 or so users and coverage was weak in many areas of the building. In addition, Leo was doing user authentication by maintaining a list of permissible user MAC addresses on the access point. This required modifications to the list once or twice a week. Recently, when a laptop was stolen, Leo could not determine which MAC address to remove from the list for several hours. He concluded that he needed to use a better method of user authentication. Also, the data encryption on the old access point was WEP and WEP encryption can be broken with several hours of data encrypted with the same key. Leo changes the key every week, but some users complain when last week’s key does not work anymore.

Leo has decided to upgrade to a WS 2000 wireless switch. He will have four Access Ports, one in the administration office area, one in the sales office area, one in the sales engineering area, and one in the engineers’ demonstration room. Throughput and coverage will increase significantly. Leo will convert to 802.1x/EAP-TTLS user authentication through the corporate RADIUS server and convert to WPA encryption, improving security considerably and reducing maintenance significantly.

The following links show the tasks that Leo will carry out to complete the wireless upgrade.

•The Plan

•Configuring the System Settings

•Configuring the LAN

•Configuring the WAN

•Setting up NAT

•Confirming the Firewall

•Adopting the Access Ports

•Configuring the WLANs

•Configuring the Access Ports

•Specify Subnet Access

•Install Access Ports and Test

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WS 2000 Wireless Switch: 1.0 Date of last Revision: March 2004