I want to implement this new goody in the 9.5 software. But, thought it would be wise and see if any other operators have tried it and how it works so far?
Is it a good thing or is it lousy?
Comments?
Thanks
Im pretty excited about it! but it officially makes our dusty dvd with prizm on it a multi thousand dollar waste of money.
his is trictly network authentication key, no encryption, so It should juust work, like the sun, it just works.
Hahaha steve don’t get your hopes up too high, you’ll probably have to buy a license to use it or it won’t work without Prizm or something 
How is this different from the existing key system? We use MAC-based controls in Prizm so I have never touched that stuff before.
No, no license.
Up until now key-based authentication was an SM sending a key to the AP, which sent it to a Prizm server to get authorization and possibly some settings for the SM.
With this, the AP itself can be configured with a pre-shared key (put the same 32-hex-character string, like [default] “0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF” in all SMs and the AP) and an SM has to have this PSK configured for the AP to allow it to connect.
It’s a means of preventing unauthorized SMs using your APs. It doesn’t give you per-subscriber granularity, for that you still need Prizm or JungleAuth. (the latter only does mac-based auth)
9.5 on an AP also adds the option of two additional authentication servers in the pool, if you use that approach.
j
The new authetication option gives a little security for those who dont use prizm…
its like the ssid. You can have a secret ssid so only your sm registrate on yours aps.
But when the networks grows, it becomes attractive to attacks and prizm is cool for security and statistics…
Sooo, has anybody implemented it yet?
Any problems with it…hiccups?
Haven’t tested on a large scale yet… but seems to work.
You can set the keys in the SM’s ahead of time, it will still connect to an AP that has the default key. Once you put the key on the AP, all SM’s that don’t have a matching key will no longer connect.
I’m a bit confused about the key itself tho. It appears I can use any hex style number between the AP and the SM but if I try to set prizm to change set the keys it requires a 32 digit number. Does it have to be 32 characters? It seems to work with any ammount of characters if you program them into the sm and ap directly.