On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Loren H. Burlingame wrote:
> they will all be hooked up in series via Ethernet).
<..>
> However, this would mean that users on the last AP in the daisy-chain
> will have to go through 35 NAT gateways before reaching the Internet.
> 
> Does anybody see this as a problem?

You're just asking for problems.

- The multiple NAT gateways will break nat-unfriendly protocols hugely
- You're daisy chaining ethernet. Bad idea! You always want to pull 
  everything you can back to a central switch. At the very least, put a 
  switch every 10 floors or something.
  http://support.intel.com/support/express/switches/10100fast/sb/cs-010971.htm
- If a AP in the middle fails/gets rebooted, everyone above them looses 
  access

My recommendation would be to run each AP back to one central switch (if
you can); otherwise, put a switch every X floors, connected to one central
switch, and hang your AP's off those switches.

This will also allow you to just run NAT on each individual AP with a
separate /24. If you can assign a public IP to each AP, that will only be
one NAT per user; if you have to do NAT on the border too, it'll at least
only be two NAT gateways (still breaks a fair number of protocols.)

-- 
Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com>   | Phone : (952)943-8700
http://www.real-time.com                | Fax   : (952)943-8500