Setting up 7 apple airports. Extended or not?

[Oyeve]

I am setting up 7 apple airport extremes for my boss who will be traveling a coupla hundred miles to install these. He wants them to basically be spread out over this huge mansion so that the big-wig who owns it will always be connected. He wants each to have an range of about 25 ips via dhcp. Should I set each one up the same except for the ips they give out or should I setup 1 and extend the other six? What is the best way to do this so that the big-wig can roam and always be connected?

I configured them to be called the same wireless network name and same WPA2.

 

[spidey07]

You only want one handling DHCP, turn it off on all the others. Space the channels out between 1, 6, 11 based on location. When the client roams it will have to reassociate, rekey/authenticate and do another DHCP request.

If you want redundancy have two doing DHCP and split the range up so they don't overlap.

 

[Oyeve]

You only want one handling DHCP, turn it off on all the others. Space the channels out between 1, 6, 11 based on location. When the client roams it will have to reassociate, rekey/authenticate and do another DHCP request.

If you want redundancy have two doing DHCP and split the range up so they don't overlap.

The problem is I also need to set up a guest network and when I turn off dhcp(actually putting it in bridge mode) it says that guest network needs it.

 

[wlee]

You can *NOT* have the Guest Network on more than one of the Airport extemes. Specifically, the one that you are going to use as the INET Router/DHCP Server. Apple does *NOT* give you user control over the VLANS. If you *MUST* use the Airports, I would suggest having 3 of them on hard-wired backbone on channels 1,6,11 and use "Extend Network" (Apples ver of WDS ) on the rest. You could then buy a couple Engenius 9550 AP's to wirelessly repeat the Guest network. While Apples WDS implementation seems to give better "seamless" roaming than most others, this is still an "Ethnically Rigged" solution, especially for someone that can afford a Mansion big enough to require 7 APs. ( BTW, my own setup at home is 3 Airport Extremes, but I do *NOT* own a mansion either )

The right way to do this would be to use something like Cisco 1142 AP's with a controller or stand-alone ver with at LEAST a real L3 POE switch ( and some kind of Router that supports VLAN Tagging ). Then you could have true "seamless roaming" on both primary and Guest networks.


Engenius 9550
http://www.engeniustech.com/index.p...l-repeater-with-smoke-detector-design-and-poe