Higher Education

Our Campus Police Chief is asking us about the possibility of deploying some wireless security cameras that he would periodically move to places he felt they would be needed most. So I wanted to put it out there and ask if any of you guys have integrated any kind of wireless cameras into your Aruba network and if so then;

a) what has your experience been like?

b) was it difficult to get cliented up?

c) was Clearpass involved?

d) do you have any recommendations as to which cameras play well with Aruba?

Thanks gang!

We have quite a few cameras across campus, though I'm not sure what brand.  Before installation, we simply grab the MAC address, enter it into CPPM as a known endpoint and when it authenticates, it recieves the appropriate downloadbale role.  I don't think we've ever had any issues doing it this way.

Thats kind of how I thought it would work with Clearpass. So you just dropped the camera into the appropriate VLAN with the Role you assigned to it and it was off and running then? Did you statically assign IPs on the cameras or did you leave it DHCP?

Yes, CPPM sends the role that includes the special camera VLAN, which is then set on that switch port.

I think that we assigned those IPs on the devices so as we didn't have to depend on DHCP.  However, all of our copiers and printers do a similar thing with downloadable roles and they are set to DHCP.

I am curious though, what kind of authentication are you using? 802.1x (PEAP with a cert) or just WPA2 or web portal... you get the idea

The devices themselves just do a MAC auth.  The laserjets and copiers have the ability to do 802.1x with a cert, but we didn't want to spend the time dealing with it.