Preventing Residential Wifi Access from Boarding Students

apizz
Valued Contributor

This past year we've had a couple issues where students have been acquiring the password for our on-campus "Resident" wireless network. We don't want students on this network, as we configure time limitations on our primary production network to prevent students from accessing the Internet late at night.

Obviously there are ways on the network side of things to prevent this kind of abuse, but I was thinking if there were a way to provide our Resident network information via a profile that only we would install that might prevent students from obtaining access to this network. Don't know if there's a way to do this such that it is accessible for Windows computers & Android devices as well as Macs and iOS devices.

At the moment, we only use Casper to manage devices we own and control. We are 1:1 for faculty and administrators, but have shared institutionally-owned machines for student use. We have not made any moves to change this to allow for including unmanaged devices in our JSS.

Would be interested to hear about any solutions or ideas that might mitigate our problem. Thanks in advance.

4 REPLIES 4

mattware
Contributor

Eliminate the network password completely, and use a walled garden capture page with SSO signon for all access

apizz
Valued Contributor

@mattware that sounds great. Unfortunately, I'm not the network admin so I don't know what's possible. Something I'll bring up though as an idea.

davidacland
Honored Contributor II
Honored Contributor II

If you own all the devices that are connecting, basic MAC address filtering on top of the password would help.

I wouldn't use it for personally owned or unknown devices, but could be an option if you grab a list of MAC addresses from Casper.

mattware
Contributor

@aporlebeke It'd be a good option but would require coordination with yourself and the network team to set it up. It's pretty common in higher ed but this would be a good use case for it.