Higher Education

Has anyone found a way to deal with wireless printers that students bring with them to campus. We are constantly seeing them dominating an entire channel when turned on. We go out and talk to the students but they turn them right back on. With this age of everything being wireless it is crazy that a printer can mess with you network the way it does.

So...this printer is broadcasting an SSID?

Use our built-in IDS/IPS functionality to "Contain" printers that get turned on, and in parallel a communication to all end-users that non-sanctioned devices are not permitted to transmit on the campus would be some options.    Not perfect...however would deter people as you start blocking their usage...and their clients ;)

Yeah...couple more points.  Place some Air Monitors in the dorms to do containment so as to not steal away airtime from the users.

Also, use our mobility access switches in the dorms as well to do wired rogue device correlation.  Our switches can dynamically admin down the ports when we find a rogue!

How many air monitors would be necessary? I know that depends on the size of the dorm but if you had to give a ratio of monitors for the number of APs what would you think seems realistic?

The VRDs do a good job of outlining basic best practices in this regard.  

Basic guidance is in the range of 1 AM : 4 APs .

I typically don't field dedicated Air Monitors very often myself as the act of IPS'ing a few Rogue devices isn't a large drain on AP resources.  YMMV depending on how many you have of course and how busy the network is natively (before IPS'ing anyone).  Remember each AP has two radios and if you 'tarpit' (the most efficient IPS capability available) the offending devices will be off your network in seconds using only half it's resources.

Good luck experimenting with this one :)

JF

What exactly is IDS/IPS functionality? I have gone for some training but do not remember discussing that functionality.

Sorry for the noob question.  I have recently been placed as a system admin over a very large network which has an Aruba6000 controller based system.

Pardon if my question seems ill informed. 

Aren't the printers still going to broadcast even though they are in containment?  So the interference (crosstalk/signal to noise) would remain would it not?

Isn't the only real solution to get the students to turn off the wireless option on their printers?

Or does containment actually elliminate the broadcast?

Yes, the only real solution is to have students disable the wireless feature on their printer.

If you have an "airspace" policy, this usually falls under prohibited use of the wireless on campus and student life can often enforce it.