Centralized wifi management for Apple Mac?

[Cooky]

We currently utilize Windows GPO to maintain our enterprise wireless infrastructure on the client side, but do not have any solution for the Apple Mac's.

Does anyone know any product, Apple or third-party, that can manage client wireless on Apples on a centralized platform/manager?

For example, if one day we decide to change setting for existing wireless SSID, or even roll out a brand new SSID, we do not want to sneaker-net to every Mac to make the change.
We'd like a central management tool that can push out the config change.

Closest thing we found was Apple's ARD, but it doesn't seem to offer capability to manage wireless.

 

[Emulex]

write a script to use the ssh protocol to make the changes.

why would you ever change the ssid? edge security on your network doesn't need ssid changing.

 

[Cooky]

Are wireless properties something that can be modified via script for Mac's?
If you know of some good tutorial sites, could you please post them?

We wouldn't change the name of the SSID, but just the properties.
Either that, or we'd need to add a brand new SSID & remove the old one when we need to migrate to a different type of wireless network.

We had an 802.11b network running WEP many years ago.
W/ GPO, we were able to gradually migrate clients to the newer 802.11a/g network w/ WPA2/AES.
One painful part of that migration was having to do sneaker-net to all Mac clients to make the changes, and I'm trying to see if there's an easier way for future wireless changes.

Also, we have a lot of whinny users whose intelligence isn't that great.
So we can't just send an email out to everyone and say, follow the attached instruction; call helpdesk if problems.

 

[Cooky]

Seriously, nobody here has dealt w/ wireless & Mac in an enterprise setting?

 

[Emulex]

i've never seen mac and enterprise used together.

you should call the apple store. That's about the biggest deployment of mac's i've ever seen in one place.

mac = unix; the rules for unix apply. you can rsh in and elevate priviledges if you have it setup that way.

Here I googled the first result for you:
I've used sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -i[<arg>] to do the job. Take a look at /usr/sbin/networksetup to round out the solution.

 

[Nothinman]

Seriously, nobody here has dealt w/ wireless & Mac in an enterprise setting?

Not really, we have client or two with a handful of Macs but they're usually treated like a redheaded stepchild. That usually works out for those users because they have more control over their PCs, but they also have to deal with most of their issues on their own.