UW Madison's wireless network is closed. The motivation for this is for accountability. Guest ID's can be created by any employee, which at least tracks who is accountable for their guest's actions. Here's the policy: http://www.doit.wisc.edu/security/policies/guest_NetID.asp
To get a guest ID, all one has to do is go to a webpage and fill out a form. Within a few minutes, the new ID is live. There is also a form to generate a bulk set of ID's fast, especially for conferences. Like I said, our motivation for this guest approach was for accountability. We have had to go through the data to track down problems (like dealing with virii) and problem people doing naughty things. I think there is a downside to the Guest ID approach, which is that I know students tend to give out their id's to their friends so they can get access too. Our approach to guest ID's doesn't seem to address this motivation. There has been some informal talk about allowing anyone to sponsor a guest. This fall, VPN will be heavily promoted for wireless access, but still not required <sigh>. We hear about how hard VPN is, and it's frankly because the clients suck. I think 802.1x is just as bad at this point too. So, users that don't have a VPN client, as well as guests (especially from corporate America) who can't otherwise install a VPN client can go through a "captive portal" for net access, although it is heaviliy filtered. We found all of the existing captive portal solutions lacking (we really wanted a layer 2 solution) and built our own. It will also be used for all public access datajacks such as those in classrooms and conference rooms. http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder/captivator/ Dale ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dale W. Carder - Network Engineer | DoIT Network Services University of Wisconsin at Madison | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (608) 263-3628 | 24hr NOC: 263-4188 | http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dale W. Carder - Network Engineer | DoIT Network Services University of Wisconsin at Madison | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (608) 263-3628 | 24hr NOC: 263-4188 | http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
