Hi,
I live in a residence of about 150 persons where we have a wireless acces to internet. The wlan is only protected by a WEP key.
Before september, the wep key was freely avaible to anyone of the house. It was invevitable that our neighboors found the key from someone on the inside. The "secure" things, they decided to change the key and not give it to anybody. The receptionist entered it himself in each of our 150 computers... wich is far from unpainfull and really not much more secure. This is because the administration doesn't have much money to put on some hardware. I instantly tough of SME, since I'm using it at home for a web server and I know it can run on a low end machine.
I then proposed them to look into some linux distribution that could manage access to the wi-fi network. In my university, there is some wi-fi access at some places (library, etc.) but even tough there is no wep key, you must login to a vpn server to authenticate yourself. I think that solution would something good to implement here. One positive point is that with a server managing connections, it would be easy to restrict bandwith to people abusing it, scan the network for virus signatures, etc.
Since I don't know a thing about vpn, I wanted to get advise from someone else. What would be the easiest thing to do to secure the wireless network? Is the vpn solution a good one? Or is there something else that would be better? Also, what kind of machine should we use for about less than 150 connections? How hard is it to manage that kind of setup? Their should be plenty of free/open source vpn client? Is there a vpn server on SME?
Thank you very much for your support.
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