Controllerless Networks

So I'll try not to ramble on but here is a little bit of background and what I'd "like" to do, just not sure it's possible.

Customer has several IAP clusters. 9 sites spread out accross 50 mile radius all connected via WAN. Each site has it's own cluster that originally was managed separately.

Customer has the same SSID name at each location. They are currently doing preshare key + MAC authentication which is working great. The problem is they have employees that travel from site to site, so when they add a MAC address to the internal database they actually have to do it 9 different times (once on each cluster) just incase the employee travels or gets transfered to a different branch.

The client has purchased Airwave and is now wants to manage all clusters with one template. That part shouldn't be a problem. My bigger question is this. Can you configure internal user database (mac addresses) via Airwave? If so will it then push all those users to each one of the clusters?

If not... my other thought was to have one cluster be "the master" and have all the other clusters querry the master iap cluster internal database for MAC authentication. 

Typically I would solve this with Radius authenticating against their AD domain computers group but this site runs Novell.

Suggestions?

The users in the Interna database are actually stored as part of the config file.  Here is a snippet of a quick test config showing two users - a guest user called "TEST" and one using MAC auth and the MAC address is 001122334455.

user TEST123 8f2025b1f21bb41177c40ac461e3229d portal

user 001122334455 e3043c82413cc38d7f5ef3b3358357f3f2a67e1cc3ea3b09 radius

Given that these are part of a config file i would suspect you could dump all the MACs for everyone into one VC then import that config file into AirWave and push it out to everyone.  That way each employee MAC would be listed at all sites.

The only limitation that you may encounter is the Max size of the "database" which is 512 entries (256 for IAP-9x).

Oh...........I almost forgot.  The next AirWave release will have an Instant Config tab (currently in BETA) that will emulate the IAP WebUI.  As such, you should be able to config the accounts right in the AirWave UI.  I believe we are targeting end Oct. / beginning Nov. for that release.

Thanks