Wireless Access

I'm attempting to replace my company's problematic consumer-grade WAP with a MSM410 running in autonomous mode.

Am I correct in believing that it is not possible for the MSM410 to authenticate access without the use of a RADIUS or 802.1X server (neither of which my company currently has)? I was expecting to be able to simply set a password on the MSM410, but it appears that I may have been naive.

If you want to set the equivalent of a password on the autonomous AP, you can use the PSK modes in WPA or WPA2. That way you set a passphrase that you communicate to your users. However, this passphrase will be common for all of them and obviously must not be communicated externally.

If you want to do something more like having each users authenticating using their own password, you will need a controller to be able to do more advanced authentication. By the way, the controller is also acting as a RADIUS server for a small network like yours, so that you could authenticate using strong encryption schemes, while not necessarily having to bother deploying a "true" RADIUS backend.

Thanks for the help Fred. This should have been obvious and I somehow missed it. I now have the MSM410 running in autonomous mode with a preshared key. I'll look into installing FreeRADIUS on one of our servers when time allows.

Thanks again.