iPads + Smoothwall + Airwatch...

[enbiggen]

Hi, I'm trying to get our iPads up and running through Smoothwall and Airwatch.

 

We've had the LA open up port 5223 for Apple "Push" Notifications (APNs), and that worked fine over our existing Smoothwall configuration using NTLM - we could push out apps etc from Airwatch.

 

However, we needed an authentication method that allows the students to expressly log out (so that they can hand the iPad to another student who would then have to log in). We've set up a transparent proxy on another of our Smoothwall UTM's network ports, with SSL redirection, and we get prompted for the student's username and password, and when they finish they can logout. Safari works fine - there's a few issues with specific apps that we can resolve later.

 

Does anyone know how we'd get port 5223 forwarded back and forth to the second network port (on its different address range) so that it can also receive APNs?

 

Has anyone already used Airwatch and Smoothwall and found a different solution?

 

Thanks.

[markberry]

I know this was a while ago so not sure if you got a solution. We are currently going through setting this up with Android/iOS/WindowsRT. It's a bit of a nightmare trying to get everything playing nice. We opened up port 5223 and a list of other ports (given by Airwatch) on the Smoothwall for the IP range used for mobile devices. We did this in Networking -> Outgoing -> Ports

 

I'd be interested to know how you got on in the end. We are at BETT this week and will be looking at Lightspeed systems as an alternative as Airwatch isn't very easy to get working or manage.

[enbiggen]

I'm afraid that, because of the schedule, we cheated, and put the iPads on the same subnet as the PCs so that air watch would work. We set the iPads to use the Smoothwall box as a gateway and set up a transparent proxy. Safari prompts the students for their username and passwords when they start browsing (or if they don't browse for more than five minutes). For specific apps that need to access specific sites to function, we whitelist those sites so that authentication isn't required.

[enbiggen]

Whoops I was thinking of air server then (when referring to the same subnet).

[enbiggen]

Okay, Airwatch has not been a good experience for us. We wanted to use it for multi user iPads, and it hasn't allowed users to login or out for about 3 months (a problem with their software - they can reproduce it outside of our network) and the level of service in response has been no where near what you'd expect.

[robk]

@enbiggen Just trialing Airwatch at the moment, and starting to hit filtering problems. Did you get everything up and running or are you still hitting issues? Not sure if our problems are smoothwall or LA firewall related at the moment.

[enbiggen]

We've abandoned AirWatch completely - we've started using Apple Profile Manager now (the iPads are only used in school) and it seems a lot easier and cleaner to use.

They fixed the issue at their end with the logging in/out issue, but it just seemed very clunky and hit and miss.

[robk]

Didn't think you could do the shared device model with Apple Profile Manager, though not looking into that deeply at the moment. Using Meraki at the moment as its free, but its not ideal!