Higher Education

With the upcoming influx of student devices looming we have successfully implemented a speedy way to register MAC addresses on our wireless network however on the wire the process is much more involved. The thought is to steer these devices to wireles to ease the registration burdon however I was hoping to get some thoughts from the group on this idea.

 

Would having these devices cause too much interference in the air? We have recently converted from an "in the hall" implementation to an every other room/suite implementation. The 2.4 GHz radios have the power set low and the walls are cinder block for the most part.

 

Thoughts/concerns/recommendations?

 

Thanks,

 

Rosie!

I built a registration process in ClearPass and have it skinned for Ohio State. I'm very happy with this and can share a bit of it offline if you'd like. If ClearPass is used on the wired network as well, it could be a one-stop-shop for you.

  

As for RF performance, some game devices (e.g., Playstation 4) are only 2.4GHz capable, so be sure that you haven't minimized 2.4GHz to the point that it's insufficient signal for those stations. Remember, airtime is what's most important, so you'll want your 2.4GHz clients to be on and off the air as quickly as possible -- in other words, provide them the highest data rates possible.

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@Ryan wrote:
I built a registration process in ClearPass and have it skinned for Ohio State. I?m very happy with this and can share a bit of it offline if you?d like. If ClearPass is used on the wired network as well, it could be a one-stop-shop for you.

[cid:850F900A-33E6-400A-99D2-2B73DD3126A5@net.ohio-state.edu]

[cid:04422877-1ACE-4B20-9DD0-4864FBBDE733@net.ohio-state.edu]

[cid:7034EA66-5627-403B-A70D-4CE8EBD0A232@net.ohio-state.edu]

As for RF performance, some game devices (e.g., Playstation 4) are only 2.4GHz capable, so be sure that you haven?t minimized 2.4GHz to the point that it?s insufficient signal for those stations. Remember, airtime is what?s most important, so you?ll want your 2.4GHz clients to be on and off the air as quickly as possible ? in other words, provide them the highest data rates possible.

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We're not currently using ClearPass but it is something I bring up at every "can we..." meeting. Right now it's an in-house php/perl script creating device registrations on the internal db of the controller.

 

Perhaps this question is for another thread, but on the wire can you stand up a captive portal or bypass based on XYZ criteria with most enterprise grade switches?

We have cisco switches, and you can use radius to return a cisco-av-pair attribute, specifically "url-redirect" and "url-redirect-acl" (you can google that), which can then point the device to a captive portal. The functionality was IOS dependent, so if you run into issues, you may need to be on a later code train.

 

I believe Aruba switches can do this even easier, as they behave like a controller (for better or for worse).

Ryan,

 

Impressive work on the registration pages from what I can see.  I'm curious, did you use the standard "gaming" portal and re-work the pages or did you create a portal another way. 

 

But on a side note, the Aruba switches along with Clearpass make getting these "gaming" devices online quick and painless.  Our helpdesk calls on gaming dropped to just a handfull a year compared to what it used to be with our old solution.

 

Regards,

 

Scott  Wolke

Network Engineer

The University of Findlay

 

 

I don?t know anything about a ?gaming? portal. I customized various forms and views within clearpass.

- Ryan -

Sorry,  I wrote that in a hurry.  It's actually Clearpass Guest, which we are using for the gaming portal.  While it works well, it's not as easy to manipulate as some of the other portal pages.  If that's not what your doing, any chance I could talk you into giving us a little more in depth look into how you went about it?  What formsand views in particular that you used?

 

Thanks,

 

Scott Wolke

Network Engineer

The University of Findlay

We used ClearPass guest. Under Configuration > Forms & Views, we duplicated several built-in forms and modified them for our use-case.

Ryan,
We would be interested in your configuration steps for registering MAC for game consoles, TV's etc. I am working at a small University in Fort Worth and need to implement a self-service function for this purpose. We have successfully deployed ClearPass and Clearpass Guest and would be interested in adding this feature for our students. Can you provide you email so we can take this offline.
Charles
csingleton@txwes.edu

Ryan,

I would be more than happy to discuss our Game SSID config. Do you
want to take this off line?

Sent from my iPhone

Hi! With the beginning of the fall semester upon us, I don?t have bandwidth to go through all our steps. Aside from skinning things, we just duplicated the following forms/views:

guest_edit_receipt
mac_create_receipt
mac_edit
mactrac_create
mactrac_list

With those customized, we created ClearPass guest operator profiles that defaulted to the customized forms/views. Thus, when those operators logged in, they used our custom forms.