Background/topology:
- We have a number of geographically dispersed offices: in the SF Bay Area, the Sierras and in Europe.
- For each office we have one router (Balance or Max families, depending on the WAN connection options)
- For each router we have a bunch of APs (mostly AP One AC minis.
- We have a system wide IC2-based SSID/VLAN management set-up, with most SSID/VLANs being used by more than one location, but not all.
- Adding new APs to a router they adopt the local set of SSIDs, determined by the identity of their local router.
The challenge: to manage/update the SSIDs with a minimum of fuss.
I see two strategies:
-
Have the APs of each location be managed by the local router/AP controller
Pro: Attaching a new AP makes it adopt the local WiFi regime automatically. Easy to introduce WiFi regimes specific to a location, with local control and visibility. Hierarchical structure.
Con: Making system-wide changes becomes a chore (and may introduce QA consistency issues), as each of the routers has to be individually updated using the Remote Web Admin tool on IC2 -
Register all the APs with IC2, and manage them completely through IC2. Localization being handled through the use of tags and associating tags with SSID/VLAN configuration choices.
Pro: Consistent (and easy) global management process
Con: No local control (all local adaptation has to be done via the global set-up, presumably using location-specific tags at the global level). Flat name space (everything defined globally). Manual, global intervention required whenever a local AP is added. And a REALLY cluttered default IC2 dashboard.
Question/wish: Is there a way to combine the features of (1) and (2) - essentially being able to use IC2 to push WiFi and VLAN configurations to the router/AP controllers, which they then adopt for their clutch of APs?