Star Net's Expertise Shines On Campus In Wireless Network

But the students at California Lutheran University (CLU) in Thousand Oaks may have it even better than their peers at other schools. The university is rolling out a wireless network that will give students the freedom to check e-mail under a palm tree or surf the Net over brunch in the dining hall.

CLU tapped longtime partner Star Net Data Design (SNDD) to help with the project. "We're more of a reseller, though we do provide a consultative sell," said Steve Marks, president of SNDD, a 15-year-old solution provider based in West Lake Village, Calif., that sells about $7 million worth of products and services annually. "And we do occasionally engage in a consulting contract."

SNDD and CLU have worked together for nearly 10 years, said Zareh Marselian, director of technical services at CLU. Initially, the integrator wirelessly enabled two of CLU's science buildings, and in the summer of 2002, SNDD performed a wireless site survey to determine the number and location of wireless access points (WAPs) needed to provide good coverage, Marks said.

The school's IT staff theorized that it would be easier to control wireless data access and prevent students from setting up their own WAPs if they invested in the creation of a WLAN. A grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for just such a deployment set the plans in motion. If students were to visit a local electronics store and buy $100 WAPs for the network, the school's problem with rogue access points might be worse than it is, Marselian said, adding that he's found a few of those access points recently.

Marselian said he was even more concerned about authenticating the identities of students and faculty using the WLAN. He and the SNDD team chose ReefEdge Connect Server to make the network more secure by authenticating users, setting access control privileges and enabling Dynamic IPsec encryption. "We needed something that did encryption at some level," he said. "The main thing was whether we could authenticate at a central source."

Chris Yonkers, a systems engineer at SNDD, said the gateway from Fort Lee, N.J.-based ReefEdge is deployed so that all of the access points are on the unsecured side, while the CLU WLAN is on the secured side. "There's no way anyone could establish connectivity without going through this gateway," he said.

Marks pointed to the special weight given in academia to unfettered data access. "In academia, the less control the better," he said. "But at the same time, there's always a concern about sensitive information being accessible to people who aren't authorized. Zareh's philosophy was for people to be able to go where they wanted on the Net. If someone is going to try to hack into one of [the university's] sensitive servers, he wanted to be able to react to the attack rather than stifle controls at the outset."

Another challenge was making sure students would be free to decide what flavor of wireless network-interface card they would use, Marks said. Cisco's authentication products are "pretty much specific to Cisco technology, so that was not an option." ReefEdge, on the other hand, let CLU deploy the WLAN securely without limiting students to certain cards, Marks said.

Currently, only classrooms have WLAN access, but CLU plans to add some dorms to the network this summer, Marselian said. Of the 2,800 full-time students, about 120 currently have access to the WLAN. Another 1,000 students are likely to migrate to the wireless network in the coming year or two, he said.

Marselian said he still must keep an eye out for technologically savvy students that flout campus policy and install personal WAPs. "Luckily, the tools to discover rogue access points are getting better," he said.

ANATOMY OF A SOLUTION
>> COMPANY: Star Net Data Design
>> FOCUS: Reselling; consulting on a variety of products and solutions, including WLANs>> EXPECTED ANNUAL REVENUE: About $7 million
>> PROBLEM and SOLUTION: SNDD helped CLU create a WLAN with sufficient authentication and encryption capabilities.
>> KEY PRODUCT USED: ReefEdge Connect Server
>> LESSONS LEARNED:
> Funding for a customer project could come as a windfall, so be prepared.
> Consider marketing wireless site assessments to test a customer's WLAN readiness.
> Schools and universities may take a different attitude toward broad data access than do enterprise customers.