Rukus wireless implemented - Now Looking to go to cloudpath- suggestions appreciated.

[genesis]

Hi

 

We are a secondary school and we have 800 students and 100 staff. We have implemented Rukus Wireless and the management is keen to allow BYOD for the students. The company who implementing was suggesting to go with cloudpath , while implementation.

 

Please let me know if you are using cloud path and had any experience with this technology. Will this be a good solution to have control over the student devices

Are there any alternatives technologies ?

 

Any suggestions much appreciated.

Thanks

[TechMonkey]

We have just been talking about CloudPath with our MSP and we couldn't work out what it offered that we weren't, or couldn't do with our current Ruckus kit.

 

It would depend on how you wanted to BYOD but we have it linked with our Smoothwall box to get full filtering. AD credentials can be used to log on to the WiFi. For signing into a shared device we have an SSID that produces a login portal, that authenticates against AD. This times out after 30 minutes of inactivity, I think.

 

Guests have a different SSID that they can sign up to for a day at a time, and use a self service portal to get a code. This also ties in with the Smoothwall so we get an idea of who is doing what. There is no authentication against this so someone could potentially sign up as Micky Mouse, but with in Ruckus we could just ban their MAC Address. We could tighten it up by having the WiFi code emailed to them, to ensure a real email, but don't see the need at the moment as that SSID has quite tight filters.

 

Once we explained that the engineer couldn't think of anything else we might want to use CloudPath for. The only extras would be wired 802.1x authentication, which would be a bit of overkill for just that, and pre-registration for guests, which we just wouldn't use.

Edited November 29, 2016 by TechMonkey

[Patman]

Hi Genesis:

 

Sorry for the late reply - just seeing this.

 

We have not had a good experience with Cloudpath. Registering Android devices is quite problematic and, in some cases depending on the version, impossible. It works nicely with iPhones. It does not work for us with Macbook Pros. Cloudpath engineers say that Macbook Pro works fine for them (that doesn't help us). They sent us a 20 page document for Android users to register - hardly practical! They told us a new version would be out this month (Jan 2017) that would fix the issues. Now they say this is delayed until March.

 

It looked like a great solution and we love Ruckus, but the implementation has not been successful. I would not recommend it. We are looking for an alternative.

 

Best,

 

Patman

[genesis]

Thanks Patman

 

Please keep me posted if you come across any alternative solution to cloud path.I will do the same.

[Net-Ctrl]

We have successfully installed Cloudpath into a number of schools, and despite a few config erros that cropped in during the set-up stage they are all up and running. These varied according to the site and their network set-up.

@Patman if you send me on a PM an explanation of set-up and your issues I can pass these over to our tech team to see if they have any advice on the set-up etc