10.5 Server Wireless Setup for a school some idea's

[shadyMedia]

Hello there,

The School I work at is looking at expanding our wireless network we are a Art's school so we tend to have allot of student's bring in there own computer's and also allot of staff and doing this as well now in the past we just had 3 airport extreme's setup around the school in a Slow WDS network but it worked and we just used Mac Address filtering to keep the non media studies student off the network because the network is rand off a Mac pro that handles the request's from 23 iMac's in our Maclab so we need to keep bandwidth under control

So what we were thinking of doing is setting up a radius server in the Mac pro via 10.5 server and then just use the user accounts already made for the student's to login into the wireless system Now! what we realize is that it wont take long for user names to get given out and then have the whole school on our network and then have the school board down or backs I have made good friends with our IT guy...Sorta had to we have been friends sense grade 6 ha ha ha but anyways what we thought we could do is when the user connects the the network trys to open safari they are redirected to a website that we make that has a login screen and once they login they need to fill out a forum that has them enter there name which home room there in there teachers name and the devices type that there using and they would only be allowed 2 devices


Now we realize thats going to be getting into some pretty big stuff so if that doesn't work what we want to do is limit the bandwidth to the wireless user's and also be able to see who is connected at one time


Any Idea's??


Thanks in advance I am typing this a t 2:30 am because I have been so busy at work so please forgive the grammar

 

[geoffreak]

You are going to need to do a lot of research in network security. MAC address filtering is VERY easy to hack.

You need a VPN router to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. You will also need a dedicated IT specialist to manage that.

This is NOT a small task and should not be taken lightly.

 

[1ne]

With Cisco Wireless Lan Controller, H-Reap AP's, radius server, AD you will have everything you need. I have done many of these implementation. PM me if you need any help.

 

[shadyMedia]

You are going to need to do a lot of research in network security. MAC address filtering is VERY easy to hack.

You need a VPN router to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. You will also need a dedicated IT specialist to manage that.

This is NOT a small task and should not be taken lightly.

We know Mac Addressing is not the greatest thing but it keeps the low grade Hackers but our rather large WPA 2 Password that worked very well for us

Our 10.5 server dose do VPN and the Airport Extreme that can handle VPN passthrough

We Manage all our other iMac's just fine and never have an issue we can't handle

All techs have there A+ Cert's
I myself have my Apple Hardware Cert
and Software Cert So I'm not a new IT guy or anything it's just that I have no idea but Radius and Controlling the wireless system with that

 

[assembled]

Lots of good ideas, but you're going to have a lot of fun implementing them, esp just on OS X

If you want to tie down wireless access, I'd suggest looking at certificate backed user/machine authenticated 802.1X / WPA(2) Enterprise, easy with the Windows CA server and RADIUS server with suitable access points, possibly quite a bit more work with OS X.

Taking your web portal page a little further, if you have a spare PC, take a look at pfSense, which has a captive portal with RADIUS authentication capability built in.

Depending on your access points, and your network layout, you could have a multi layered approach where you have 802.1x on the access points, and then the captive portal to access beyond the wireless backbone.

Hope this at least gives you some ideas.

 

[shadyMedia]

We where also thinking that we could just run a stand alone computer running windows or a Linux Based OS for Wireless Management system

The only thing is that we would want it to be able to link to the user accounts on the server that way we don't need to re create them

now were a small school maybe 600- Student's and maybe only 30 user's maybe more at one time it's hard to say

Thanks for the reply's