Pete Biggs wrote:
I configure wireless once on my device (phone/tablet/laptop) and then can travel to institutions all round the world and use their networks seamlessly. How useless and infeasible indeed.
Well, this country
"this country"?
Germany
is almost the worst of all countries around the world when it comes to internet access. Though they list a few locations here where you supposedly could use their service, I wouldn´t expect anything. Then there´s the question of protecting your privacy. For example, how much do they pay you for allowing them to keep track of your travels?
I think you've got the wrong idea about eduroam. John Hodrien was just using it as a real world example of WPA2-enterprise in action. It's a private network for academic institutions - it allows members of Universities around the world to gain access to the wifi at a local University they are visiting. It's not a public wifi service.
It isn´t really private, either.
It's a convenience - a very, very convenient convenience. If you don't want someone tracking where you are, then don't use it. But TBH if you are visiting another university, then in general your location is known!
Without wireless, your general location may be known as in "visiting university X"; with wireless, your location is known as in "is currently in room X of building Z". That is quite a difference, and in either case, what about your privacy?
In any case, it wouldn´t do our customers any good because there aren´t places all over the world where they could use our network.
Your customers wouldn't be able to use it anyway
If there were places all over the world where they could use our network, they could.
A client that can't authenticate gets the network it's provided with by being unauthenticated. If an unauthenticated client can't have any network access, that's what they get. Presumably you could drop an unauthenticated machine into a different VLAN.
That would be a problem because clients using PXE-boot require network access, and it wouldn´t contribute to security if unauthorized clients were allwed to PXE-boot.
So restrict based on MAC address at the PXE boot stage.
MAC addresses could be faked.
The PXE protocol, as far as I can see, has no concept of authorisation
- although its certainly possible to introduce it after PXE has done
its bit (but before imaging or whatever).
You may be better off with authenticating the DHCP using RADIUS, but it's a complex process which, by its very nature, requires some form of non-authenticated network access.
So the solution might have to be not to use PXE-boot anymore. That would be a pity because it´s so convenient.