Hi Support,

We are building a wifi mesh for a large village showground in the UK (Heckington Show, Heckington, Lincolnshire).

OC200 controller, router ER706W-4G, bridge tx/rx 2 x CPE710, switches 2 x SG2008P, 10 x EAP650 as 2 meshes (5 in each) located in two large fields totalling an area about 150m wide x 700m long.

There will be almost 250 trade stands spread throughout the showground, and each trade stand needs to accept payment cards for purchases by customers.

The card readers need to connect to the wifi, most will be via bluetooth through the traders mobile phone, but many may also be direct connection from the card reader to the wifi (no user interaction for login name/password, just the passphrase set in the card reader).

Plan is to use PPSK without Radius to provide per trade stand authentication to the wifi. (Prefer not to use captive portal or local user as this may cause a problem for some card readers and we think PPSK without Radius will serve the purpose).

However there appears to be a limit of 128 records per PPSK Profile ?

Question 1: Is this 128 limit just an arbitrary figure? (I believe it has already been increased from 50 to 128 a couple of years ago).

Question 2: What is this limit related to? Is it a mesh limit, an AP limit, a Controller limit, or a Router limit? Will my workaround suggested below help or will the system run out of some resource, counters, memory, or affect client connection/data statistics?

We need possibly up to 250 unique passphrases (although some trade stands might not want wifi access). We will use the auto-create feature of the PPSK profile to create the full range of 250 randomly generated passphrases, which will be provided to traders, together with their allocated stand number, in advance of the show which happens July 27th/28th.

Ideally, the easiest way for this to be done would be using a single PPSK profile applied to one VLAN ID, and hence to a single site wide SSID applied to ALL APs in both of the meshes.

However, to workaround the 128 record limit I was wondering if we can set up two PPSK profiles, one containing 128, the second containing the remaining 122 (total 250)?

But then we have to arrange these two profiles applying them across the two meshes, enabling the two corresponding VLAN/SSIDs to the APs to coincide roughly with the physical locations of the trade stands (with some overlap where some trade stands will be covered by two or more APs).

If there are two SSIDs for the traders then they need to know which SSID their passphrase applies to.

This can be made obvious by naming the SSIDs as tradestands1-128 and tradestands129-250.

Also would we be able to use the same VLAN ID in both profiles? I have a feeling we might need two VLAN ID's as well.

Would really appreciate your input on this please. We have already purchased enough network kit for us to perform initial setup and testing (OC200,router, one switch, 3 EAP650s), and we have now come across this conundrum!!

It's entirely possible that the answer is actually fairly simple - I'm quite good at making things more complicated than they need to be, lol !!

Thanks

Jim