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jb61264Flag for United States of America

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Issues with PAT on wireless router

I work at a facility within a university and we are therefore subject to the university's wireless infrastructure which I have been told is set up for dynamic addressing using Port Address Translation. We need to use wireless temperature monitoring for cold rooms throughout our facility but are having an issue when trying a couple vendors products.

Long story short is that we have had no success using a couple different vendors...I have been told that it is because the university uses dynamic PAT and that essentially means there is no way to establish a "handshake" between devices on our subnet and the wireless network.

My question is what would a transmitter have to be capable of in order to be used in this situation or maybe nothing could work because of the nature of the wifi setup? I guess my confusion lies in the fact that when you are connected to the university wifi and (say for instance) request a web page, that you can get a response back for the web page, or that email can be delivered to your phone, etc.
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Michael Ortega
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I'm not sure what PAT/Dynamic PAT has to do with this. I would assume the network based equipment you're trying to install is authenticating to the University wireless network and so should be on that same subnet unless the University made some special provision to allow you to authenticate to your own private wireless network on a subnet of your choosing.

Some other considerations is that a lot of universities have acceptable use policies to access the internet and so you can't technically browse the internet until you manually accept that policy upon connecting.

Also, a lot of guest wireless networks employ client isolation techniques to insure client wireless devices can't talk to each other.

Perhaps this gives you some things to think about.

MO
I agree with above.
I work in education and follow every guide line.
I have a feeling their IT are over complicating things for you and are using incorrect terms.
they can easily set you up a another hidden SSID and allow it access, the monitors I'm guessing are for their benefit. they will soon moan if the server room over heats.
can I assume the software sits on the wired network internally and the environment monitors need to communicate between that or is it cloud based?
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ASKER

MO, thanks for your response...the university does have acceptable use policies that I follow. The MAC address for devices that connect to the university's wireless have to be registered and I have done that and confirmed that the temperature device is talking to the wireless router using a script that an admin for the university network provided for me...just that I can't see the device using the vendor provided software to receive the data. The university wireless admin said he would have to open up all ports on the wifi router to make that happen and that that goes against security policy (which is why I guess he is saying that the dynamic PAT is the root cause?)
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Stolsie, appreciate the response...I did bring in a personal wireless router to temporarily test the device on our subnet and was able to get it to communicate just fine when connecting the router to an ethernet port that was in our subnet and then use a wifi adapater on my PC to communicate with the transmitter. I have discussed this with our facilities director and suggested that he submit a request to have our own wifi router(s) which we could configure to not broadcast SSID and we could also use MAC filtering on so only the devices we include in the ACL could communicate through it but he wants me to exhaust all options first (which is why I'm doing an inquiry here).  You are correct about the software sitting on the wired network internally and the environment monitors need to communicate between that...not cloud based (which I guess could be a potential solution...having the transmitters communicate to a cloud based storage location)
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Stolsie
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Michael Ortega OP Answered that in his reply to my questions
Stolsie,

Yes, I see that. I was in the middle of drafting my response when that was submitted. Our messages were 15 minutes apart.

MO
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Appreciate the feedback, unfortunately there isn't a resolution to this other than the university is over-complicating things for us