In the environment that I am in we are quite loyal to Cisco. End to End Wireless Infrastructure is overlaid on a 5508 WLC. Air-1252 and 1262′s litter than campus and in the high density areas Xirrus Arrays handle 300-500 clients in concentrated spaces. For the most part it is flawless. VLAN’s segregate areas or groups defined on logical containers such as, Year level, Faculty or any tag we want to assign.
With the advent of iPads and the need to print/stream/make them even better in the enterprise, Apple leverage the Bonjour protocol for a lot of features. This is great. Simple connectivity and discovery and I am sure at home it works easily enough. Enter the Campus and the TTL value of 1 for Bonjour. With the TTL set as 1 the moment the bonjour packet hits a gateway it’s all over.
Aerohive address this issue with their Bonjour Gateway. To find out more read the whitepaper linked below or the marketing guff in the second link. It was almost like Aerohive read my mind! Good timing! One of the best parts of this solution is that you don’t need to have a Aerohive only network. It is multi-vendor compatible! For a small purchase headaches can be solved! This makes it appealing to other wireless environments such as Cisco, HP, Xirrus, Meru, Meraki.
Aerohive Bonjour Gateway White paperÂ
My thoughts
Well I give them points for giving the issue some attention. I know in an EDU environment that a lot of BYOD consist of iPads. It will be good to see the first deployments and hopefully I can get my hands on one from my suppliers and do a write-up.