Overcoming Wireless LAN Management Challenges

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Overcoming Wireless LAN Management Challenges

Features

Overcoming Wireless LAN Management Challenges

1/30/2004

By Justin Borthwick

In 1999, the University of Wyoming rolled out an 802.11-based wireless local area network (WLAN) and has a leading research university with more than 12,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff. University of Wyoming planned to cover its entire 785-acre campus with a WLAN, requiring about 200 Cisco access points (APs). However, after installing 54 APs, expansion plans were temporarily put on hold. It had become evident that University of Wyoming required a greater degree of control, stability and efficiency in managing its WLAN before it could continue its large-scale deployment.

University of Wyoming needed a system to provide authentication, authorization, dynamic bandwidth management for users, applications to ensure optimal quality of service (QoS) at each access point, and out-of-the-box integration for a variety of AAA/directory systems, granular monitoring, and reporting of all WLAN activity. After conducting on-site evaluations of various systems in a lab environment, University of Wyoming implemented Central Site Director, a WLAN management, control, and integration platform from Roving Planet (www.rovingplanet.com).

Tracking WLAN Usage
Prior to implementing Central Site Director, University of Wyoming struggled with a lack of visibility and reporting. The university could tell whether an access point was up or down and what the aggregate throughput was but couldn’t tell who the users were, how much bandwidth they were consuming, how long they were connected to a given AP, or what applications were being accessed. In addition, they could not track authentication failures, sense AP migration or tell which users were engaged in abusive usage, such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing. Finally, they lacked visibility into all of the AP configuration parameters.

University of Wyoming network administrators now utilize Central Site Director to easily track WLAN activity across its entire campus. Detailed, real-time reports communicate who is accessing the network, when, from where, and how long the applications were being used and the amount of bandwidth being consumed. In addition, University of Wyoming expects the dynamic policy management to become increasingly useful as wireless network utilization increases. For example, University of Wyoming can apply dynamic policy management to address requests from certain instructors to restrict Internet access or access to specific applications during their classes.

Implementing Secure Authentication
With its initial WLAN installation, University of Wyoming had relied on Mac filters for authentication and encouraged students to use Cisco client cards because Cisco LEAP provides a secure authentication and encryption mechanism. However, this meant that students could lend their cards to other non-authorized users, and the Mac-based authentication left the wireless network vulnerable to Mac spoofing. In addition, until recently, any wireless user had been able get to every application available over the WLAN, which frustrated University of Wyoming’s application administrators. They wanted to specify which servers, ports, and applications could be accessed depending upon the user.