Student Macbook Air First Login issues - AD Authentication - Wifi not connecting

[Fissette101]

Good afternoon,
I am having an issue with first logins with our Macbook Airs. We have a 802.1 network with WPA2 Personal encryption. When logging in for the first time we have no issues at all over ethernet - creates the mobile account and then everything is good. Once logged out, the laptop drops the WiFi - (or is connected but not pingable) and we are not able to log into new accounts. This is an issue with our roaming student laptops, as each student will have their own login and may move between computers. It is not feasible to log into them on every computer before the new year (or at least does not sound like much fun).

Is there a way to keep the WiFi adapter on and connected? Any other ideas on authenticating our AD users while connected to WiFi for the first time? Thank you!

[davidacland]

You'll need to deploy the wifi setup via a config profile and set it to be used at the login window. I've only ever done this with WPA Enterprise, not sure if it works with WPA2 Personal.

[bentoms]

@Fissette101 Our wifi works at loginwindow, but it's q computer levels 802.1x.

So completely different.

How do the wireless settings get installed? Is the key a generic one or one per student?

If it's one key & deployed via a profile, it may be hat the profile is deployed/scoped at a user level & rescoping/deploying to Computer resolves this.

[Fissette101 · Accepted solution]

Thank you both for your help.
After some messing around, i figured out our solution. Our old systems were using an Open Directory server along with AD and they were first authenticating on the OD server. On the new systems we were not binding to the OD server, so it had no where to authenticate to.