Is it a good idea to use DHCP for point to point connections ?

[Liontaur]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Jerome Herman <jherman at dichotomia.fr>wrote
>
>
> It is indeed a lot easier. Unfortunatly it cannot be used in this case.
> Basically it is an hotel that is already wired in CAT.6. We ant the clients
> to be able to connect through wire without resorting to routers or DSL
> modem, with just DHCP set up.
> The hotel is composed of 33 small residences connected with fiber. The idea
> is to avoid the part where we buy 33 layer3 switches at 3000$ a piece.
>
>  Jerome Herman


I work for a hotel as well and we ended up going with a 3rd party solution
due to our chain's requirements, particularly the no need for the end user
to have to do ANY network configuring on their end requirement being the
most difficult. We ended up going with a hospitality gateway from Ethostream
as they were the cheapest (between $1100 and $2600 depending on which
gateway you pick). They also do 24/7 tech support which is another
requirement of our chain. I can say that i'm very impressed with both their
gateway (we went with the dual WAN gateway since having two separate
connections is yet another of our chain's requirements) and their tech
support as they're not just your typical script readers from my limited
dealings with them.

I tried for many moons to get something open source working for us. pfSense
came close but there's still end user config required. Our chain requires
that no matter if the guest has a static IP or DHCP set, no matter what
their DNS servers are, no matter what (if any) proxy they have set, they
have to have connectivity with those settings. I'm not sure how the
Ethostream gateway does it yet (i'm looking into it though, just for
interest's sake, we're going to keep them regardless) but it works.

As for switches (we have 114 wired rooms plus meeting rooms plus some WAPs)
we bought 3 Netgear FS750T2's as they are fairly cheap ($330-ish CAD) and
are somewhat managed (they do port or tag based VLANs).

Contact me off list if you want more info on Ethostream.

Mark