After a delay of the best part of a year, Mrs Weaver has recruited a friend of her who actually works for Cisco and who is reflashing two 1830 WAPs for me which I bought for cheap on ebay at the start of 2017. They are due to come back to me shortly.
I'll report my experiences with them if anyone is interested?
They are 802.11ac "wave 2" spec, so should be fast. It is claimed that these products are very Apple-friendly, in the sense that the two companies have supposedly collaborated in making sure that products work properly together, especially in respect of faster roaming amongst other matters. So I am hoping that the Apple devices I have will at least
work properly in a multi-AP environment, having been warned by the saga of Ubiquiti plus Apple told in posts at RevK's blog, for example at
http://www.revk.uk/2017/04/working-with-ubiquiti.html (I don't think that link is the latest part of the story, can't seem to drop on the relevant blog post just now).
I want lots of strong security features. Protection from attacks against LAN infrastructure would be very nice. Speed is nice but a luxury at the moment given that I don't have that many WLAN clients and internet access is so incredibly slow compared to typical WLAN speeds. It's really just an experiment to learn about them without paying >£800 for a pair of devices.
The hassle with these device has all been because I don't have the cables, dexterity/mobility or a suitable PC any more to connect them to in order to fiddle about with the RS232-style console interface and sort the software out. But then that's not the only problem: I also lack (ii) clue and (iii) software, so was completely 100% out of luck. It is just bad luck that the boxes didn't have the correct software in them when they arrived from ebay, or so I believed - not even knowing what correctness looks like. I could have complained to ebay and possibly got my money back but I wanted the kit not the money and also I would have to actually know what I was talking about rather than defaming the seller by saying that I merely ‘thought’ that it was the wrong software load.
I wish I knew what I was doing in respect of doing something useful with VLANs and these APs. I would at least like to know enough to be aware of any benefits I could get in terms of security and ease of administration by using VLAN tags with the devices. Any kitizens out there deeply VLAN-literate? I would appreciate some pointers as I have never had call to use them, being too ancient myself, and VLAN tags hadn't yet been invented in my day.