topic Re: Chromebooks in Automation/API Discussions

Chromebooks

cornbelt140 — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 20:54:45 GMT

We are a school district with a growing number of Chromebooks. We are having problems identifying what student is on the Chromebook. We have a work around right now (Captive Portal), but it relies on the student shutting down the Chromebook when they are done using it. If the student does not shut it down that next student would be still using the credentials from the earlier student until the session timeout expired. This is not a great solution. It may be possible to utilize RADIUS authentication to the wireless network, however we need a way to identity the user. Is there any custom XML API's around that can do this?

Re: Chromebooks

UhMayYeah — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:31:23 GMT

Hello cornbelt140 ,

If you disable session cookies in the Captive portal (CP) config, a CP user mapping would be lost once the browser window is closed.

Using is behavior to your advantage , a user using a shared Chromebook can just close the browser window to let a new user re-authenticate.

The following Doc talks about Radius and User-ID integration in the environments using 802.1x devices and wireless access points and controllers.

A script can be configured to run on the Syslog server that will extract the user and IP information from the message, format it correctly for the UID-API, and then send it to the API agent.

Ref : UserID API integration using Syslog

Also check : USER ID Issues

HTH,

Ameya

Re: Chromebooks

cornbelt140 — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 17:27:35 GMT

We have tried closing the browser on the Chromebook (CB), but it will not release the CP until we shutdown the CB. I will look at the other API stuff, but I'm not a programmer, so I hope I can figure it out. Is there any sample scripts available for me to look at?

Thanks,

Mike

Re: Chromebooks

SP — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:54:19 GMT

Did API stuff solve the problem? We are experiencing the same issue. What affect occur if we disable session cookies in the Captive portal (CP) config for all personal devices (iPhones, iPads, Andriod, etc.)?

Re: Chromebooks

cornbelt140 — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 18:29:47 GMT

We have not successfully built an API, so I don't know if it fixes the problem yet. Any help in building/implementing the API would be great.

Re: Chromebooks

CHammock — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 08:50:34 GMT

If the idea of using the API and Programming scares you, you could deploy a V6 UserID agent (or upgrade you existing UserID deployment) which will except syslog directly from you wireless solution as discussed in the above doc. All you would have to do is write a regex pattern to pull the username and ip address out of the messages sent from your wireless solution. The onbox PANOS V6 agent already has some regex patterns for more popular wireless and other solutions so if you update this post with the system you are using someone running PANOS 6 may give you the regex you need.