How do you handle wireless network passwords?

[Melissa Saubers]

Do you change them on a daily basis?
Or do you use a similar system that a hotel would use where the user has to sign in each day and it's good for 24 hours (not sure what it's called)?
Or something else?

Thanks!

[John Wilker]

Ours is written on the white board. :)

John Wilker
Founder, 360|Conferences | Partner, Uncubed
(720) 381-2370
twitter: jwilker
johnwilker.com | 360|MacDev | 360|Stack | 360|iDev

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[Melissa Saubers]

Daily? Thanks John!

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Melissa B. Saubers
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[Alex Hillman]

We've changed ours twice in 6 years. The inconvenience of constantly changing passwords is a killer for the members. 

Is there a particular thing that you're concerned about that has you wanting to change the password daily?

-Alex

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/ah

indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

[Tom Brandt]

We've changed ours once in three years, and it is a pain both to inform the members and for members with older machines to change it.

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twb

Sent from my aye phone

[Jerome Chang]

We haven't changed our password in 2+ years either, however...our issues are everything after that initial authentication.  One of the biggest problems we have is someone's hogging our bandwidth. Drop a 500mb movie file in Dropbox midday and then, it's like rush hour heading into the Lincoln Tunnel. So we have to throttle each user, etc.

OR, one side of the office somehow has way more devices on it so we need the other AP's to help balance the load.

OR, one Internet feed drops so the 2nd/back-up needs to kick in immediately, and likely with different throttling settings since it has less bandwidth.

OR there are too many other AP's nearby and their channels or whatever cause enough interference.

Etc

Jerome (not from an EvilBerry)

www.BLANKSPACES.com

[Alex Hillman]

+1 to everything Jerome said. 

There's plenty of pain within a network of people who are SUPPOSED to be able to get on the network. You don't also want to make it hard for people to connect in the first place. 

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/ah

indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

[Tom Brandt]

We have a few Ethernet ports scattered around and ask that people with ginormous uploads or downloads to use them rather than hogging the wifi. This has worked fairly well. 

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twb

Sent from my aye phone

On Jan 14, 2013, at 11:22 AM, Jerome Chang <jer...@blankspaces.com> wrote:

[Aliza Torok Schlabach]

Do any of you use multiple carriers simultaneously (not just for back up)? Example - Comcast + Verizon? I'm wondering how complicated that would be to set up.

Also, if you have a single password for the entire coworking space, is there any way to tell who is hogging the bandwidth?

Thanks!

-- 
Aliza Schlabach
Founder

Coworking for Parents / Juice Box

www.CoworkingForParents.com

215.858.4658

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[Alex Hillman]

We're in a bit of a stranglehold for providers in our area, unfortunately, but our router (a pfsense based router) handles both bonding of two connections, as well as doing failover in case one takes a dive. 

It also tells you about bandwidth usage per client, and as Jerome said, the easiest answer is throttling each client, though that can result in a crappy experience all of the time. 

For a long time I underestimated the complexity of running a network for more than a dozen or so people. It's a constant game of whack a mole.

-Alex

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/ah

indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

[elliott williams]

We pretty much have one rule, "Don't be a jerk", which has worked out
pretty well. This usually entails that if I have a super important
Skype conference call, I ask people to not torrent for the next half
hour. It's not foolproof, but it's free and easy and fosters
communication to solve problems rather than rules.

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Alex Hillman

[Tom Brandt]

We have Comcast and AT&T coming into Workantile, and we were load-balancing between the two. But the problem was that if you were switched to the other carrier, your IP address would change and some services didn't like that. VPNs don't like that at all, and some web apps, like Harvest, didn't like it either. So for a while we nailed one of our wifi networks to AT&T so people who needed a persistent ip address could use that. 

Now, we use Comcast for our primary connection and AT&T for a backup. This eliminated a lot of confusion about which network to use for what. 

As for bandwidth use, your router's network management interface should tell you which mac address and host name is using how much bandwidth. 

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twb

Sent from my aye phone

On Jan 14, 2013, at 11:56 AM, Aliza Torok Schlabach <aschl...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Matthew Arkin]

If you wanted to keep the same IP address, you'd have to get your own IP block and then do some BGP sessions, for most internet providers, you'd now become a IP Transit customer instead of a standard internet customer.

There is some software that you can run on a spare computer that you can use to authenticate internet users, the set up would basically put the computer between the router and your internet connection. A lot of firewall appliances also allow for internet authentications, you could give each visitor their own login info.

Matt Arkin

Kollective Solutions 

[Jerome Chang]

Hi.  We and several other coworking spaces us Meraki.  The individual user log-in info is all cloud-based, which for some of you with multiple locations, a total breeze to have them access at every location.

As for Aliza's question, yes, we have 3 simultaneous connections.  One is not used for "back-up" per se, but as you can expect, when one goes down, the others are can be overwhelmed, especially if an asynchronous DSL connection.  You'd need a switch to simultaneously manage multiple connections.  To be literal, you'll have 3 modems for 3 connections, then they all merge into a single switch, which connects into your patch panel(s)/server rack.

As for handing out ethernet cords for big up/downloads, that might not be feasible for someone who is nowhere near an ethernet jack, and also requires the user to speak up to get said cable.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

On Jan 14, 2013, at 8:30 AM, Tom Brandt <twbr...@gmail.com> wrote:

We have a few Ethernet ports scattered around and ask that people with ginormous uploads or downloads to use them rather than hogging the wifi. This has worked fairly well. 

---

twb

Sent from my aye phone

[Jacob Sayles]

We change up our wireless passwords every year or so and write it on every whiteboard around the space.  We also like to make it funny and our current password is "totallysilly".  Previously it was "whatpassword" and "itscomplicated".  Oh the fun we have.  We also have ethernet at almost every desk so that's always an option for people.  

For internet connections we have two.  One main one and a backup connection that handles the phone lines.  We tried merging the two but didn't really have a good time with it.  Some folks run systems that don't play nice on a multi-WAN system.  So we just do failover.  We also use PFSense and I'm a big fan.  

As an added bonus we have a little integration between our PFSense firewall and Nadine, the system we use to track members and activity.  I wrote up a simple system to import the list of all the devices connected to the internet into Nadine and then we have a little magic that ties each device to specific members.  It only works when a member signs into Nadine at least once from inside the office and since not everyone does it's not something we can put too much weight on.  We don't use it for billing or anything but we do use it to drive a "Who's Here" page and a screen inside the office.  Of course members with desktops always show up as here but it's still useful information.  

Jacob

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Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation
http://www.officenomads.com -  (206) 323-6500

[Tom Brandt]

Well, our space isn't that big, so getting to an ethernet port is not a real burden. We keep a few cables in a designated place for people to use. 

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twb

Sent from my aye phone

[Mojo]

This is a very timely post - as our area of the city experienced a system-wide outage for about 15 minutes the other day with Charter.  We have a Charter Business service with 50Mbps ... and no usage cap.  We have a wireless router on each floor to complement the 24 ethernet ports distributed throughout the space.    I agree with Alex - at coworking space should NEVER be without easy/uncomplicated connection to awesome quality Internet service.  

So, after the outage the other day, we're looking at a back up.  Some members suggested that we look at a 4G connection just to activate during emergency outages.  We also have another really great local ISP here called Skyrunner.  Does anyone have a true "back up" system in place?  If so, I'd love to hear more.

I also would like to explore further the idea of throttling bandwidth hogs.  I don't think we have many ... but is there a way to see which connections are using the most?

On password changes ... we only changed passwords once in the past 2 years.  We moved locations and it was like starting new again.  We felt like it made sense to have a new passwork  ;-)

Cheers,

Craig

[Alex Hillman]

We currently pay $50/month for a Clear 4g modem that we fail over to. 

It gets swallowed up really fast, and I might argue that no internet is worse than internet that barely works.  

We actually have more issues with upstream latency than actual download/upload speeds. The end effect for our members is "the internet is slow or intermittent", but for the most part our pfsense configuration has addressed most of it and helps us address additional issues as they happen.  

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/ah

indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

[Jerome Chang]

Ugh.  Clear works all around our office, but not immediately on this block.  Same goes near my house.

Sorry everyone.  Clear could've solved a bunch of things for me but I had to search elsewhere.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Alex Hillman]

Truthfully, I can't say that Clear is much of a solution for anything and I'd consider it as an experiment largely a failure. 

When we fail over to it everybody still knows it. In order to even send an email to our list to let people know about the outage, I usually end up tethering to my iPhone. 

We don't have other broadband ISP options. DSL options are in the same speed territory as Clear, and FiOS can't get here soon enough. 

I've been negotiating with some local fiber providers to do a deal with us, but even when I get them into "reasonable" territory it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than we're currently paying.

Comcast business class is fast as hell…when it's up. Which is most of the time, depending on the season :)

-Alex

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/ah

indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

[Tom Brandt]

We have a Comcast 50mbps connection which is our main connection, and an AT&T 18mbps u-verse connection for our backup. We have a router, the brand/model of which I have forgotten, which handles failover. Like IndyHall, it's more upstream latency that's an issue rather than the connection speed.   

The Comcast connection has been surprisingly reliable and Comcast's customer service shockingly responsive. AT&T customer service is characteristically sucky. Fortunately we don't need them very much.

I can look at the failover router we use if people are interested in the brand and model.

---

twb

Sent from my aye phone

[Jerome Chang]

I keep hearing about this Comcast 50mbps connection from those who have Comcast...is it 50/50????

We have a 15/1 DSL from Megapath and if more than 2 people download intensively, it might as well be 1/1.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[John Wilker]

We're running comcast business at 50/10, with hardware to support going up to 100 down (can't recall the up on that level)

John Wilker
Founder, 360|Conferences | Partner, Uncubed
(720) 381-2370
twitter: jwilker
johnwilker.com | 360|MacDev | 360|Stack | 360|iDev

[Joshua Marpet]

Alex, 

I know the local provider you're potentially working with, and it's a "You get what you pay for" issue.  Comcast is oversubscribed, and bandwidth strangled.  That's how they can charge less.  Remember the old modem days?  oversubscribed modem pools were cheaper, but crappy service.  Same situation applies.

Clear is nice, but again, oversubscribed, and desperate for money.  

PFsense is a great suggestion someone on here had.  Free, amazing quality, and works on lots of different equipment.

It will aggregate multiple connections, bandwidth quota (throttle the Hogs!) and do most everything you need it to.

Check with DSLReports.com to find niche bandwidth providers in your region.  A friend of mine in East Stroudsberg used to get 25 static IP's, 25/25 service, and paid 55 a month.  

If anyone needs serious bandwidth, and is willing to pay reasonable serious money  (being honest here), feel free to contact me.  I can put you in touch with a few people.  (Not my business, I just know people.)

Joshua

[Cristina Santamarina]

We don't change our wifi passwords - members have their own login and password and we automated this a while ago. Not a surprise I guess at co.up we use cobot's wifi integration - we use it to give access to the network, track member's attendance, and discount the time passes. Here's a link on how it works for not technical people like me: https://www.cobot.me/guides/wifi-integration. 

Regarding the internet itself, no complaints. We can host a lot of people and no problems other than the intermittence feeling Alex mentioned.

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

We probably change ours every 10 months or so and it is posted up in every room. We have 2 wireless routers since our building is 3 stories and my members configured it so that you can flow seamlessly between routers if you are moving around the building.   We also have hardwire ports in each room so that people who are doing big stuff can use those instead of wireless.  We got by without them for a year but then the members really wanted them and the equipment appeared on my desk one day!  We also have fun with passwords. Current ones are liberated@cohere and for our guest network it's Jointoday!

Angel