Need help with a 800 user campus
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Hello Everyone,
I am supporting an apartment complex that houses around 800 college students. What they already have in place is a wireless network that is running off of a 15MBit up/down fiber connection and a pfSense router running on a dual Xeon 2.8 system that has 2GB of ram in it.
The students are complaining about not having enough speed. The landlords are ok with having any p2p downloads and gaming either be limited or eliminated. Basically all the landlords care about the students being able to do is use the internet for homework related research etc.
They would not like to have to pay for any more bandwidth but since they do have fiber, the sky is pretty much the limit on available speed, and I am open to whatever you recommend for speed, and they don't mind sinking money into hardware for me to make this thing work right for them.
They would also like to run their management office off of the same connection and drop their land lines and switch to a VIOP system. There are 5 users in that office.
I will include the system status screen and a screen shot of the 6 month states graph.
I am basically looking for advice on what changes need to be made to the speed of the internet connection, the hardware, and the way the firewall/traffic shaping are configured. And anything else that would help. Right now the students are on break so most of the apartments are empty, leaving me with more available downtime to get some of this work done.
Thank you
-Caleb
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I would say your hardware looks good. Even though you have a lot of states, the memory/CPU seems to handle the load just fine. I would focus your efforts on traffic shaping (p2p blocking/limiting) and creating a vlan for the management office/VOIP. Persuading the property management to increase their bandwidth would also go a long way towards a solution.
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Thanks for the advise!
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What speed would you recommend?
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What speed would you recommend?
"It depends". Ultimately just adding bandwidth isn't going to fix anything, 800 college students will find a way to peg anything you can afford to throw at them, from my experience with many similar setups to that one. Throttle the P2P, and ensure you have enough bandwidth to meet general web needs. Probably will want to limit each user to a particular speed as well. Probably going to want to use 2.0 for that setup, for the best options for bandwidth control. I've done a few setups similar to that on 2.0 that are working nicely.