4 SSIDs 1 Secondary Academy – BYOD WiFi Setup

The BYOD network is quite possibly the hardest to setup (and thanks to the Smoothwall support guys for spotting an obvious mistake I made on my DHCP config the first time round!) of all 4 of the SSIDs by also the most rewarding when you see 300+ students and staff connected on their Phones, Laptops and Tablet PCs. In a typical school BYOD network setup you will have two hoops to jump through, authenticating onto the SSID and then authenticating against the schools web filter. However using the neat WPA Enterprise authentication mode on Smoothwall firewalls its possible to both authenticate onto the SSID and the web proxy at the same time making life much easier for your users.

So time to get the configuration going…

Smoothwall Firewall

First up you must have configured a VLAN for the exclusive use of the BYOD network (as per the guide here – https://myworldofit.net/?p=6473) taking special note of setting the IP Helper Address to a virtual network adapter on your Smoothwall firewall which sits in the BYOD VLAN. Take a look at the screen shots below for more info…

NB – in this configuration the Smoothwall firewall will allow connectivity to the internet at the users policy level, if you want to allow BYOD guests to access your internal resources you will need to configure the Smoothwalls DNS and Zone Bridging features. I will touch on this in the next article.

HP MSM

The configuration on the HP MSM is similar to setting up the Domain WiFi network in that a RADIUS server is configured and the VSC is configured to use that RADIUS server.

User guides

To help you get started with your own user guides feel free to download and modify the ones that I have used at my establishment below.

  OSA-BYOD - Android (498.4 KiB, 2,229 hits)

  OSA-BYOD - iOS (3.3 MiB, 2,257 hits)

  OSA-BYOD - Windows 7 (796.7 KiB, 1,974 hits)

  OSA-BYOD - Windows 8 (2.1 MiB, 2,012 hits)

  OSA-BYOD - Windows Phone (206.9 KiB, 1,757 hits)

  OSA-BYOD - Windows Vista (1.5 MiB, 1,845 hits)

You will note that Windows XP is omitted as it is no longer a Microsoft supported operating system (although XP does work with this configuration).