Hey, so I quit that terrible job as an armored truck driver back in October and after a month of temp work I ended up with a long-term temp job as an IT assistant for the county, who is overhauling their entire IT infrastructure and adding tons of new facilities including a new jail.

Anyway, I'm just smart enough to have gotten myself involved in everything going on but not smart enough to really know what I'm doing. We're having to do a lot of cleaning up an old mess of a network and a lot of trying to figure out what the hell the vendors and contractors have been doing.

So, to get to the point, we've got several managed switches with VLANs set up for different functions, including 3 separate VLANs for the 3 buildings. We've got a bunch of WAPs that we need to set up for different purposes, and 2 access controllers that are in place. One of them is set up for simple access to an outside internet connection. The other is not set up at all. That's my job.

So, we need a way to control WAPs on two different VLANs with one controller, OR we need to put the controller and the WAPs all on their own VLAN but control access based on location/user/SSID or whatever and route them to the correct VLAN to get access to their internal network.

TL;DR Basically we need to design an internal wireless network using a dozen WAPs of varying types and 2 HP MSM7xx access controllers, with separate SSIDs preferably for each group of users who are on different VLANs. And I have no idea what I'm doing. Does anyone here know some best practices or have some experience with this to set me on the right path?

Talk to these guys: http://www.proxim.com/. I've had extremely good luck with their products over the years.

**** wireless, run cable

Thanks, gbk, I will look into them. Still muddling through this. And alan, I would love to run cable to each handheld for the jailers and the deputies, but I feel like that might be a bit difficult what with all the doors, you know. Logistically speaking. Haha.