network

WiFi is hard... Yes, even with today's Top Gear.

Wireless is already ubiquitous in any modern home or business these days, yet it’s one of the areas that probably most upsets employees, managers and IT staff all alike. There’s an assumption that business WiFi must be easy because anyone can purchase a cheap home wireless router and set it up at home, so how hard can it be to do the same thing for a business? Actually for a small business where you’re just providing connectivity for one or two people with their work laptops and maybe a mobile phone or two in a small office, it’s probably not too difficult at all.

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Procurve Manager - multihomed gotchas

We are almost exclusively a user of HP Procurve switches where I work. We have a wide range of models that we’ve used at both core and edge and have been happy with them over the years. One important part of our current toolset for managing switches is the HP Procurve Manager Plus management tool (another part is the invaluable tips on the evil routers website). Once you move beyond a certain amount of switches it becomes inefficient to manage them all by hand and tools like this which allow you to bulk manage error and performance logging and manage switches in bulk become invaluable.

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