What is the best way to use vlans without massive administration effort?

[Sven Kessler]

Hello,

our actual situation is as follows:
We have round about 50 2610 switches and we use 15 vlans for different purposes. For example there is one vlan for our shop floor systems, one for the printers and one for the phones.

At the moment we do a simple mac based authentication. All our telephones are users in our AD with name = mac address. So the switch checks against the radius and when the phone is recognized as phone it goes to vlan 72, all other devices go to the unauth vlan. The config is:

aaa port-access mac-based 4 logoff-period 9999999
aaa port-access mac-based 4 auth-vid 72
aaa port-access mac-based 4 unauth-vid 82

Now the problem is that this works well if you have only 2 vlans. But all our other vlans (for example shop floor systems) have to be untagged manually on the switch. This is a massive administration effort because we have to change the switch configuration everytime a machine is moved. There is also not the same unauth vlan on every switch because our vlans represent each a class c net and this is not big enough to offer an address for every device.

So the question is: What would be the right way to handle vlans without such a huge administration effort? Not all our clients are 802.1x compatible.
Can you please gibe me a hint in the right direction?

Thank you

Sven

[Sven Kessler]

Oh, i was so stupid. Now found the right documents and fixed my problem with the right radius setting and mac based authentication.

Best regards

Sven

[Arran Cudbard Bell]

You can also use GVRP if you don't want to worry about tagging the VLANs on the uplinks.

There's a small bit about it here:
http://wiki.freeradius.org/HP#GVRP_and_Dynamic_VLAN_assignment

Despite what some people say here GVRP does work and has been used is 600+ switch networks successfully :)