Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Multi-Tenant Network, 802.1x?

Had something come by my desk the other day that was interesting. I am no network guru, but in my office I am the closest thing to it.

We are looking at designing a network from the ground up for a shared work space. The initial idea we had was simple, each tenant or client has a VLAN specified for them on wall ports, and an individual SSID for wireless. But it turns out the scale we are looking at goes much beyond that. There is around 250 users, mix of wired/wireless, and they don't stay in the same spots.

So we started looking at 802.1x authentication for both wired and wireless. We would spin up a Active Directory environment with a RADIUS Server(NPS). Create user accounts for all tenants, all that good stuff. When people connect to the wired or wireless network, it will prompt them for a login. They use their user account, RADIUS authenticates, the switch will dynamically assign that port to the VLAN that RADIUS specifies.

I've set up something basic like it in our lab, and it works, but it does have some quirks. We use a cheap netgear switch in our lab, which might have something to do with it. But my general question is has anyone done anything like this before? Does it work well? Any recommendations of other ways to accomplish the same thing?



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