This topic came up on a newsgroup the other day, prompting me to look around a bit. Basically, MS added support for the newer WPA2 encryption protocol for wireless networks in XP, SP2. This KB article describes the Wireless Client update that you can apply to your XP systems to get them to process those WPA2 policies. But here’s the catch–this update only allows these systems to process the wireless policies. It does not allow them to actually edit those policies. In fact, a search around the web reveals that the only way you can define WPA2 encryption in your wireless GPOs is to use Vista or Longhorn as your GP editing client! That’s right, there is no support in GP Editor on XP, SP2 or even Server 2003, SP2 to get at those new WPA2 options. XP, I’m not surprised about. MS doesn’t even expose the wireless policy node in XP without some major tweaking. I’m not sure why they didn’t provide this in 2003, SP2 however, since it was released pretty recently. In any case, if you want to use WPA2 and want to control it via policy, you will have to use Vista (or Longhorn) to define those policies.
Technorati Tags
WPA2,Group Policy,Wireless Policy
JUN
About the Author:
Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.