[SOLVED] Managing Assets on your network

[JimShorts]

How do you manage your macs/pc/linux on your network? I only want this list of assets to have access to my network. What are the tools you use to manage it? Whats your best practice? Do you manually update/maintain a blacklist or do you have an automation of some sort?

 

[bill001g]

You talking about a couple pc or 100 machines at a office.

In general there is no effective way to do this in a home or very small business network. On wifi to a point you can filter by mac address but mac addresses can be changed by users if they try hard enough. Home routers have no ability to limit ethernet connected devices.

The way most business do this is to use functions included in the microsoft server package. Simple domain login solve most issues but this can be extended to the network using 802.1x on both wifi and ethernet. All wifi equipment supports this and many better brands of switches support it. If you really want things secure you require certificates to be installed on machines before they are allowed access.

Now if you are too small to do this you have few options. To limit wifi you could use a small radius server and run enterprise mode even on a consumer router. There is no way to limit ethernet connected devices that I know of that can't be trivially bypassed.

 

[hang-the-9]

How do you manage your macs/pc/linux on your network? I only want this list of assets to have access to my network. What are the tools you use to manage it? Whats your best practice? Do you manually update/maintain a blacklist or do you have an automation of some sort?

Without specific scenarios there is no single or even 5 answers to this. For one example , we work on over 1,000 devices in our home office and handle over 200 stores that have dozens of systems each we work on from computers to printers to android hand-helds to iPads, etc... We use several programs to do this, SCCM, AirWatch, Azure Microsoft services, Acrtive Directory, simple hand filled in databases of our computer hardware, our held desk software can tie into hardware data from other areas, etc... There are a dozen good programs and hardware you can use to monitor things based on your environment from all-in-one solutions to several ones based on "best of breed" setups vs something from one company.