Windows Clients with SSID {2,3,4 suffix}
Greets - this isn't specifically a question regarding FR, but I believe it has enough relevance to the list, as well as FR in a slightly abstracted way (perhaps the solution rather than the situation). I have been using FR to handle my radius auth, split between networking devices and clients for wireless AP for a number of years. The majority of my hardware is Cisco, with AP's both as autonomous and LWAPP with a WLC. I've been seeing it for quite a while now (from Win 10 forward at least) - and to a particular end have just "lived with it" however am wondering if there has been any solution observed - particularly since there is a large distribution of transient clients in the eduroam sector. The problem? Multiple APs for coverage show mutiple SSIDs in the windows wireless network selector. Thus you get MYSSID, MYSSID 2, MYSSID 3 and so on in some attempt to rationally allow the user to choose the AP they want to connect to. I have been googling for a while now - far too many rabbit holes with little solid results - and have come across reasoning such as "you don't want to choose the rogue AP, so this alerts you" and "this lets you choose the strongest AP in the area" etc. My android devices don't do this, the Mac and IOS clients I service don't do this, my Linux clients don't do this - everyone but Windows seems to have the ability to automatically roam and not present multiple variants with suffix numbers in the SSID list. The problem with the multiple SSIDs in the list is really that sometimes windows comes back with the "can't connect to this network' error, which really impresses people for sure! (not). Of course it would be awesome for someone to pipe up and say "here's the registry setting and done", but it may not be as simple as that, understood. So some more configuration info: I do run a mix of autonomous AP's/LWAPP APs in an area, which I choose is based upon device count - typically if I'm only doing coverage for 3 or 4 APs - the expense and hassle of a WLC often isn't warranted. I also have typiclly 3-7 SSIDs (thus mbssid options are on) supporting the network; not all SSIDs are present on all bands, nor on all APs - however a lab scenario with 3 APs and identical configs in a 2.4ghz only setup showed the exact same results, so I am not expecting the more advanced config to be a culprit. For encryption, I'm typically configured for aes-ccm and tkip. I run multiple models of AP's typically with their most recent firmware, and mostly a/b/g/n, 2.5Ghz/5Ghz with only a very little ac. However this may be the kicker: some clients don't have the ability to run an enterprise auth method - so it's WPA2/PSK for them. Thus I have a mix of authentication - the PSK is at the AP itself, and anything enterprise (like EAP-TLS) is pushed forward to an FR instance. Interestingly, the EAP-TLS SSID's don't show the suffixes all the time - if I hover with my laptop it takes quite a while for Win10 to start showing SSID 2 for them, while anything that was WPA2/PSK is immediately shown as multiple SSIDs with suffixes. Thus the overall question here is less FR and more about picking folks' brains, wherein the solution may be provided by FR using a different auth key management path than the local WPA2-PSK (although I have never attempted such). But either way, Many thanks, Ted.
participants (1)
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Ted Hyde (RSI)