Wireless with PEAP

[Bobo]

Right, I work at several primaries and last summer worked out which I felt was the best way to set up wireless in a school environment after various research.

 

I have IAS on a server 03 environment with GPO pushing out a wifi policy with PEAP with selfSSL certificates. It works in general fine, we have come to the conclusion we need an AP in every classroom for a suite of 16 to log in fully... we are using the aironet 1200 series. We use ranger and sophos with mandatory profiles and the speed is good enough as long as there is an AP in pretty much every room, with G as opposed to dual band as the APs dont support dual band I dont think.

 

To start with, is there a better way of using wireless? I have put wireless into several schools this way and it has been quite stable for the most part.

 

Secondly every now and again a computer "drops off" and wont come back online unless you log in hard wired and do a gpupdate, some of the time it seems to be battery/time date related, but does anyone else have this problem? Would taking the GPO off help and manually entering in the settings for wireless and certificates?

 

Also some of the dell laptops we are using sort of lose their settings as such, when you log in hard wired and look at the settings the available networks tab is missing, there is no icon in the taskbar, and if I uninstall and refind the device it then picks up the network and logs in, I plan to do all windows updates and get the latest driver but I feel the laptops should have been bought with better cards than Dell cards, but I just really want to know if anyone else has had the problem?

[strawberry]

we have a similar problem with it forgetting settings, we find though that it comes after a fairly long time scale (every 2 weeks or so ) . We also find that wsus and sophos over wireless can make the laptop barely useable for a lesson. Hence we recommend that one a week or so the machines are pluged into the network for booting.

[Michael]

I've never had any great success pushing out Wireless settings via GPO. I can't say I've ever had laptops "dropping off the network". Do you mean the laptop cannot see the network or cannot obtain an IP from DHCP?

 

Going into the Properties of the Wireless Adapter and choosing the Wireless Networks tab allows you to manually enter security information, so the laptop automatically finds the network.

[Bobo]

It is neither, more the network adapter will stop behaving normally, maybe I will just have to manually add the settings.... the problem is the Wireless Networks tab completely disappears. We use sophos in a few schools where the problem can arise, although I do not deal with these directly.

 

Do many have a problem with sophos and wireless? If so, how do you get around the problem?