Changing Wi-Fi password on schedule

[nextyoyoma]

I'm on a large enterprise network. Our shared-used devices are on a WPA2 network whose password changes twice a year.

Anybody have any luck coming up with a scenario to address an issue like this on macs? We do have some iPads, but since they still get updated while sleeping, we can just push a new profile the day before and let them be offline for a few hours. With the macs, I'm trying to avoid touching every machine at a specific time, since some of ours will likely be checked out (i.e. not at our physical location) when the change occurs.

Some approaches I've considered:

• Schedule a cron job and add the network with networksetup I know cron is deprecated but it does generally work
• Create a policy and run it the day before the change, late in the day. They'll be offline for a few hours until the change takes effect but it won't matter. We can only get the ones we have, but that's better than nothing.

[jared_f]

I am assuming you disabled password sharing on your devices?

I pushed a separate WPA2 backup network profile with a completely different SSID. Enable it for a few days during the password swap. Once all devices have the new profile I switch off the backup SSID and bring the other SSID back online.

[nextyoyoma]

I wish we could do that, but we have no control of the SSIDs. We're on a university network, so that is a no-go.

In the absence of a better suggestion, I think we'll just push a policy the day before the change and let them be offline for a few hours. Any that we miss we can just connect to ethernet to let them run the policy. Kind of a pain, but still beats having to update manually.