The State of Victoria, Australia's Department of Education has rolled out 10,000 access points across 1,700 locations: Their first problem was convincing Cisco to disable the reset button on their routers. They did not want technicians to hit a button that would reset APs to a default state that lacked the security and other options that were considered baseline. They also found a weakness in Cisco's central management solution for WLANs in both cost and functionality. The technology security head for the department said that Cisco's devices couldn't traverse NATs (network address translation gateways) and would have cost $30,000. They built their own software in two hours.
The network uses generic AMD-based Linux systems to handle proxying and authentication in each of 1,700 locations. Interestingly, the security head said that Microsoft and Intel didn't find the rollout "interesting"--certainly because of the AMD and Linux components involved. The department is keeping its integration of open-source and free software components private at the moment, but said they are obeying licensing terms by contributing elements back to each project.