Cisco WAP581 Wireless Access Point

[jlficken]

Sweet. Thanks for the feedback. Interesting capabilities and price point in Cisco's SMB line. I like that you can cluster up to 16 without a controller install. Definitely some enterprise features on board, but with simpler and more direct management, which is nice.

So I learned something that sucks yesterday and it has resulted in me RMA'ing my unit and sticking with UniFi (ugh).

Cisco pre-sales said that I could add mixed models to the same Cluster, however, I found in the manual (and confirmed with Cisco) that this isn't the case. All AP's in a cluster must be of the same model which sucks!! I don't want to spend $300 on another WAP581 for my shop that will have at most 4 clients on it ever when the UAP-AC-IW works just fine for that location and it cost me $60 :-(

I also learned that the Link Aggregation is Static only on the WAP581 and it doesn't support LACP which is also a bummer but it would still work with my switches.

This leads me to believe that the Grandstream GWN7610 would be a better option for me since it can (I verified and have seen it work) act as the controller for the GWN7600. The downside is that it isn't a Wave 2 AP but at least it works.

For now though I will just stick with UniFi as I'm tired of spending money on AP's.

 

[coxhaus]

I got the WAP581 over lunch and set it up to replace a UAP-AC-PRO. First off it is HUGE!!

Mounting was a breeze and the configuration was pretty easy. The worst part is that setting up a Guest SSID is much more difficult than on the UniFi system. I wound up making another VLAN and making the SSID then assigning it to the VLAN and turning on "Channel Isolation". I had initially dumped it onto my main VLAN but then even with Channel Isolation on I could see all of my switches and router which I didn't want.

Other than that it seems like a very nice AP. It has as good of range as the PRO as well. I still need to figure out how to limit bandwidth for the different SSID's and test the Link Aggregation.

I can tell you are not real Cisco-savvy. The way you handle limiting access to the switches, servers, network, and etc. is you use ACLs access control lists. This is a very common Cisco tool. The ACLs filter the local LAN traffic. You can even share printers with guess to where the guests have no access to the main LAN only the printer.

I like using a separate VLAN and SSID. I works well and it is the way I do it at home. But I also use ACLs to control traffic flows on the local LAN.

 

[jlficken]

I can tell you are not real Cisco-savvy. The way you handle limiting access to the switches, servers, network, and etc. is you use ACLs access control lists. This is a very common Cisco tool. The ACLs filter the local LAN traffic. You can even share printers with guess to where the guests have no access to the main LAN only the printer.

I like using a separate VLAN and SSID. I works well and it is the way I do it at home. But I also use ACLs to control traffic flows on the local LAN.

You are correct in that I am not a networking expert and have a lot to learn about ACL's and L3 stuff in general.

This was for home though so like you I wanted to keep it simple.

 

[coxhaus]

You are correct in that I am not a networking expert and have a lot to learn about ACL's and L3 stuff in general.

This was for home though so like you I wanted to keep it simple.

So did you keep your Cisco WAP581 AP?

I just bought 2 of them for my home. My daughter needed my Cisco WAP371 APs. I had 3 of them.

 

[jlficken]

So did you keep your Cisco WAP581 AP?

I just bought 2 of them for my home. My daughter needed my Cisco WAP371 APs. I had 3 of them.

No I didn't. I'm still using a UniFi AP's at home.

The fact that I couldn't combine models from the same series into a single Cluster was a deal breaker for me. I wanted the WAP581 for my main AP, a WAP571 as the secondary for the house, and then a WAP371 for the shop and the old garage but I couldn't do that.

If I could have done that I would have happily ditched the UniFi AP's. It's not that they are garbage (now that I finally got my UAP-AC-HD replaced that was defective) I just don't like the UniFi system in general.

For now UniFi is working and I'll switch them out to something else as they die. Hopefully Cisco has an option for what I want to do by then.

I still use Cisco SG250/SG350 switches though at home and at work. I just deployed 4 SG250-26P's at our offices to replace dumb switches for POE and VLAN's as well as installed Untangle at the main office since we got a gigabit fiber line recently.

Until I had to reboot the SG250's for a firmware update they had been on for right at 6 months with zero issues. I know they aren't enterprise level but especially the SG350 series are very feature rich. My core switch is a EdgeSwitch ES-16-XG at home so that I can have a 10Gb uplink between my router and switch for inter-VLAN routing as I don't want to mess with L3 at the house.

House - https://dl.dropbox.com/s/4o5r3c90ug57dbf/KIMG0986.JPG

Shop - https://dl.dropbox.com/s/8uyw1lbad3idfg6/KIMG0383.JPG

Home Lab - https://dl.dropbox.com/s/8hc332mpntc58aw/KIMG0996.JPG

 

[coxhaus]

As far as I know none of the Cisco wireless APs will cluster with other models.

The Cisco WAP581 APs have higher gain antennas than my old Cisco WAP371 APs. I am going to try to cover my house with 2 instead of 3 using 1 at each end of the house. I am hoping voice call roaming works better than the WAP371 APs. The WAP371 APs would drop a few words when they roamed. Plus the WAP581 have high density in that they support 64 active users per radio and 200 connections per AP. So if I have a large party I think my wireless will cover it over what I normally use.

I have had 40 plus people at my house. In the old days I had a 4th of July party with over 125 people. Boy did with we go through some smoked barbeque. I borrowed a smoker on a trailer.

Now days everybody has a cell phone.