Group policy to prevent domain users from connecting to other wireless networks?

[MrEgo]

I work at a school district, and we have a WPA2 WLAN that we use for our laptops and netbooks. The problem is, if the students lose connectivity to the WPA2 WLAN, they will check to see the list of available wireless networks, and they will click on the first WLAN they see on there - which is often someone else's WLAN.

Since we do not broadcast our SSID, and the students are not administrators on the laptops, a member of IT has to come around to every laptop and remove the other WLAN from the list of preferred networks.

We are running Server 2003 and our client base is 99% Windows XP. I noticed that there is a computer setting that allows you to specify a preferred network, but it doesn't appear to prevent users from manually connecting to other WLANs that are not specified in the GPO.

So my question is this - is there a way to prevent the students from connecting to a WLAN that is not ours?

 

[snikt]

We're not running wlan here at work so I'm not familiar with wlan and GPOs but maybe this can shed a little light.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787465(WS.10).aspx

 

[JackMDS]

It might be that one of the reasons that they lose the connection is because you do not Broadcast your SSID.

In any case I am not aware of way to put such a restriction on general Wireless concretion.

 

[MrEgo]

Hm.. well, even if they don't lose the connection, the students still have the ability to choose from whichever WLAN they want. It seems like Windows should have the functionality to lock this down..