Automatic WiFi Username/Password App - Ideas? Help?

[galanop]

Hello

I currently work for a school district with about 600 iPads. Our iPads our connected through our PEAP network.

iPads randomly are having issues where they get disconnected from the network and once disconnected, it is requesting a password. Since we do not share our username and password with the teachers, I have to travel to the school and enter the password in manually each time.

I was wondering if any of the clever people in these forums have any suggestions to how this can be resolved without a) opening our network b) giving out the username and password

I was thinking of a simple app that the students can download when they do have internet connection that can automatically enter in the username and password when they don't have an internet connection. Kind of like a WiFi config profile, but local to the iPad so an internet connect is not needed to use it. I have no coding experience so I don't know how hard/easy it is to do this but it was just a thought.

Thank you.

[tobiaslinder]

Hi @galanop I think you are searching too far. This is surely not normal behavior and it would make more sense to find the source of the problem.

Are you providing this login information to the iPad over a mobileconfig profile? If so the re-entering of the username and password should not be necessary. Switching off and then on again of the Wifi should do the trick. If not then there must be a serious issue with your wireless.

[Rhinehart]

We sometimes have the same problem. Most of the time if i have the user connect to our guest WiFi, the iPad will reconnect to the JSS, and it gets a new WiFi cert. through a configuration profile. then i just have the switch back to our production network.

[galanop]

I am providing the login info over a mobileconfig profile, I also was not providing the login info over the mobileconfig profile and was getting the same result. I haven't had them try and turn off and on the WiFi. Let me see if that works today.

Thank you.

[blackholemac]

Oddly enough we share your EXACT same problem. What I have taken to doing when it happens is to put people on Guest, exclude them from the wifi profile, reapply the wifi profile and all works...lame but our network admins don't want to deal with this really...they always tell me to have someone "forget" the network. You can't "forget" a network when a profile is being used to connect. Will follow this thread for ideas if nothing else.

[Jerod]

We have the same issue with iPads and have developed the same work flow that blackholemac mentioned. It's slightly annoying, but it works and is better than the re-enroll process that was being used before.

[tobiaslinder]

It would be interesting to see what exactly happens on the wireless side when the client machine disconnects.

1. I would connect the iPad to a Mac with xCode and look at the log files.
2. Also look at the logs of the wireless network when the disconnect happened. Depending on the vendor you should be able to search by MAC-Adress and find some info.

[galanop]

@blackholemac How is your guest network setup? I don't believe that same workflow is possible the way ours is setup.

[bughollow]

I have our wifi set-up in the Configuration Profile for the iPad. I turn on an open hidden SSID briefly to connect the iPads (I also limit it to connect to the JSS can Apple as we are using DEP so it save a step on set-up), once the profile is distributed I turn off the SSID and the iPads connect to the correct SSID without fail.