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How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

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I work in a small elementary & middle Catholic school. In order to ensure that only filtered internet is available in our classrooms, I need a way to make sure my students access only our wireless routers. We are located in a residential neighborhood bordering the downtown area. So we have neighbors with unsecured wireless and the downtown area is a free hot spot available to all. Excluding them one at a time isn’t realistic as people move in and out of the area all the time. I couldn’t keep up with the changes.

In addition to locking into a small list of wireless networks, I need to make sure students cannot change the wireless settings. (Our older students are happy to change system settings when things don’t work like they think they should.)

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Clarifications

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

Clarifications

what controls do you have over the PCs in the classrooms?

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

I assume these are laptops? Are these laptops owned by students or the school?

What OS? Are these PCs on a domain, part of a workgroup, or standalone?

Reponse To Answer

In reply to what controls do you have over the PCs in the classrooms?

More information:
They are running Windows XP w/ SP3; owned by the school; standalone; currently only one signon and it does have admin privileges. (Oh my!) They are part of a “portable lab” on a cart that is rolled into different classrooms as needed. I only see them when they stop working.

I will have the summer to reconfigure these machines to my liking. I will be creating a student sign on w/o admin rights and reimaging the machines. It should be noted that, like everyone else, we are experiencing financially difficult times. My buget is almost nonexistant!

yes you can do this, we need to know what robo_dev asked

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

Robo_dev is right we need info from the workstation side.

Yep. If it is your network entirely,

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

no admin rights for users. Ever.

Reponse To Answer

In reply to Yep. If it is your network entirely,

I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary to purchase additional software. Seems like there should be something in control panel that would do the job.

work around

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

it’s possible to limit it, but it’s useless and troublesome, every time / day, your older student should check every pc/laptop.
just my suggestion.
make a simple program. the program is like attendance list. it must be installed in every laptop and automatically run when connected to your wifi.
every time student login into your wifi router. they get counted.
each student get unique id and only can login once to program.
so when attendance count < laptop count, someone using other wifi. may need 1 pc , act as server to keep the attendance list/ counter. you can expand the idea.

Jammin’

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

You could try jamming or running more wifi routers with the same SSID of the open ones, just don’t connect the routers to any network. When they try to connect to the open routers, yours being the closest will be selected. If you could track down a “honeypot” program that allowed selection of SSIDs then one router would effectively block any nearby freebies. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their operations and I can’t see why it should. the main problem is you will have to do regular scans to identify new hotspots.

Use Netop School

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

As one said above make or find a simple platform like “Netop School” so you can monitor their work. If a kid doesn’t get on the system give him a minus. If the kid is really smart 😛 it might bring a second wireless card to play with the other networks xD

Reponse To Answer

In reply to Use Netop School

Thank you, I will look into Netop School.

Kill the Admin Privilege for the User

In reply to How do I limit students to use only specific wireless routers?

Kill the Admin Privilege for the User and use a user management s/w like Netop school as mentioned above.

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