Things to check before connecting a personal laptop to WiFi network

[genesis]

Hi

 

We have few students who have brought their own laptop and teachers have askes me to connect the laptop to or school Wi-Fi.

Do we need to make sure if they have a valid antivirus software on their personal laptop?

 

Also, what are the thing that I need to consider before connecting their laptop to or school Wi-Fi.

 

Thanks, and any suggestion would be great.

[paulkerton]

Do we need to make sure if they have a valid antivirus software on their personal laptop?

Yes! You absolutely do. You're asking for trouble if not.

Also, what are the thing that I need to consider before connecting their laptop to or school Wi-Fi.

Do you have them on an SSID that is segmented away from the rest of the network? They should be treated as guest wi-fi, on a sub-net from the rest of your school devices, throttled and port limited to allow them only to access the web, essentially. You don't want a guest device appearing on your network and then happily torrenting away. I would also consider guest access controls, so they need to login with a Google/Facebook/Apple login for an access token... or make access tokens available to collect from somewhere/sent via SMS.

[the_quick]

If you have school guest wifi - that should do it. We have one that traffic is only allowed internet, no access to local servers at all, only DNS and DHCP.

 

If you don't, I would be very careful about it.

[mavhc]

a) What do the devices need to access?, hopefully nothing internally, just the internet

b) How will you still filter them?

c) How will you know who's accessing what?

[Sonic007]

Definately get a guest Wifi network setup with network isolation. Do not put on same network as the admin/domain etc or rest of school.

[MartinT]

We have a policy that allows only currently supported versions of OS to be connected. Specifically:

 

Windows 10 20H2 and onwards

MacOS 10.15 Catalina and onwards

 

Windows 10: Defender (built-in) AV

MacOS: Sophos Home or other AV

 

For devices:

iOS 15.0 and onwards

Android 10 and onwards

 

Nothing earlier is allowed.

[mavhc]

How do you know what OS version is connecting? And that they're not lying

[MartinT]

How do you know what OS version is connecting? And that they're not lying

 

We're starting by making it an honesty thing by raising awareness of OS versions.

 

Then we'll try and do it via our Ruckus controller and/or CloudPath if possible.

Edited April 25, 2022 by MartinT

[MartinT]

Then we'll try and do it via our Ruckus controller and/or CloudPath if possible.

 

Further to this, and having had a demo of Ruckus Cloudpath, we're probably going to go with it.

 

Is anyone else using Cloudpath?

[TechMonkey]

Further to this, and having had a demo of Ruckus Cloudpath, we're probably going to go with it.

 

Is anyone else using Cloudpath?

 

Yep, got it last month. Only really using it for onboarding users but will be looking at what else it can do for ensuring devices have AV on and to weedle out old versions.

It is very cool if a bit overwhelming!