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Some universities and businesses do this already with things like this http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/network_sentry

from the URL, It looks like Bradford Campus Manager.

It's what we use for remediation at the college where I work, and that URL, Particulary the Remediation part, is the same area that Bradford puts their CSA.

I can only say how we use the system, so I can't vouch for cmich or other school networks, but we pretty much use BCM for these purposes.

1) Check for patches on a system.
2) Check for the university supplied Virus scanner and how up to date it is.
3) Send messages to users. Specificially as part of our emergency alert strategy in case of severe weather or Schoolwide Crisis.
4) Locate PC's (Or anything with a MAC address for that matter) if they are lost or stolen and are still being used on our network.
5) Block Rogue DHCP servers, like someone mistakengly plugging in their home router on their LAN side (instead of WAN), or running Internet connection sharing, or a virus that is DHCP Spoofing.

As far as I know, it doesn't do any kind of traffic or system spying of any sort. Its basicially designed to keep non university users (or users with a problem, such as outdated AV) from getting into the network and doing damage by subnetting anything thats not registered at the switch end. The only thing a non-registered user can do is see the remediation page and login, and if they can't login their SOL.

As for the Net itself, although we use a QOS system to control bandwidth usage, we don't track anything other than what traffic is using how much bandwidth and throttle based on demand vs performance. IE if Bittorrent is sucking 80% of our bandwith, we throttle Bittorrent so that other services, (WEB, Email, XBOX, ETC) can get more traffic. My guess is that most schools follow the same principal.

http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/board/board.cgi?id=CM_CaseStudy&action=download&gul=32

you can read about CMU's Agent here.

http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/

Posting anon as I don't care to link myself to them. I don't work for them...just use their product. Little quirky at times, but for the most part, it's a pretty solid product! I'd hate to go back to manual port management...it's bad enough doing it for 100 ports nowadays (we let CM manage ResNet ports and other non-critical ports).

I don't know about the OP, but we use a product called http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/Bradford Campus Manager. --adam

Cisco is a late player to this game, and they're still catching up. They bought a company to bring this technology into the Cisco brand, and they're still working on "cisco-izing" the product.

Last time I checked this only works with Cisco hardware in the wiring closets.

Other than that, does it yet come close to the capabilities of Bradford's Campus Manager? Any college trying to lock down their resnet probably used Campus Manager.

Bradford Networks has a SuSE Linux-based system of network policy enforcement. We use it at Bloomsburg University and it's pretty well eliminated our ResNet virus problem.