Problems with Chromecasts on school networks

[Seth Mayo]

We've been attempting to integrate Chromecasts into some of our classrooms (1:1 Chromebooks for Yr5) - with little success.

Has anyone else out there worked on getting Chromecasts to work reliably on their wifi network?  Were there any tricks that you found that helped?

The following have been our observations so far...

• Attempting to join the Chromecast to a hidden SSID always fails.  However, joining it to a visible SSID and then hiding the SSID after the initial connect works fine.  Either way, it didn't matter to us - this was easy to get around.
• Various ports listed on Google help page need to be opened for the Chromecast to get out of the network to Google.  If it doesn't contact Google, it won't move to its 'ready to cast' screen so it is not usable until its Internet requirements are fulfilled.
• In terms of filtering, it doesn't seem picky - different profiles at our school (Staff, student, etc) all allow the Chromecast to work fine - no issues there.
• The Chromecast once connected to a visible SSID does end up shown to any Chromebook joined to the same SSID.
• Any Chrome browser or device can then connect to the Chromecast...but, there are frequent intermittent display issues when casting (ie. freezing, casts that complete drop, etc).
• Setting up a ping and monitoring an AP reveals that the Chromecast is swapping to different APs at the same time that the cast stops and pings fail.
• After scaling it back to a single AP in the school with a test SSID for the Chromecast to talk to so it can't jump APs, it then works.
• Obviously, this isn't a permanent solution...but for the meantime, our interim solution was to do the following:
• Set up a Chromecast SSID on each AP at each location where a Chromecast is (eg. SSID Chromecast03 is for Chromecast03, etc).
• Allowing that SSID to simply be on the same VLAN as the wireless network allows the client and Chromecast to talk fine
• The end user devices can then be on the SSID that spans the school and the Chromecasts can sit on networks that only exist on the AP in the room they are sitting in.  All connects, all happy - just tedious and limiting!

Perhaps the most limiting factor is now that we have APs that allow up to 4 SSIDs (per AP or sitewide with overrides allowed) and I'm now using all of them.  All students are on one SSID, staff on another, there is a guest network and now a Chromecast network.  In the end this means Chromecasts for staff OR students as I can't get them to sit on both networks at the same time but I also can't place a student and staff Chromecast in a room because I'd need 5 SSIDs to make it work.  Of course most brands of APs don't go past 4 SSIDs as it gets to be too much for the AP to manage.

Our assumption on the jumping AP observation is that our APs do run on different channels automatically.  This could be causing the 'disconnect' when jumping between APs...but there is little we can do to change this at this time.

I suspect the Chromecast would work fine if it was sitting in an environment with matching channels across APs - but then again, that may cause some noise issues, etc but we won't go there...

Any ideas?  Any comments?  Anything you think I've missed or could try?

Seth Mayo
IT Technical Manager
DID: 02 8203 1368

5 Howe Street, Campbelltown NSW 2560 | PO Box 997, Campbelltown NSW 2560
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[Blake Seufert]

Hi Seth, i too am interested in this solution.  A few questions:

• What AP brand / model are you using? Sounds like your wireless system's handoff isn't working very smoothly.  Our cisco's roam OK.
  
• How do you avoid students using an android phone, downloading the Chromecast App and re-setting up any Chromecast (As it uses wifi direct)?

Love to hear more about this,

Thanks

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McKinnon Secondary College

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[Antony Street]

Seth,

We were also running a trial but I decided to can it for now because I couldn't give the reliability a 10/10. Without that I just get too many support requests. The Chromecasts kept dropping off the network randomly. Sometimes we had to reboot the Chromecast, other times we had to reboot the teachers laptop.

We run Cisco APs and set a specific SSID for the Chromecasts. That SSID sat on the same VLAN as the staff SSID so the staff could see them but still be using the 802.1x.

We were so hopeful for this to work but we'll just have to wait until it matures more.

Antony Street
IT Manager
Thornlie Christian College

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[Mark Edwards]

Hi Seth,

I have multiple Chromecast's running on a separate SSID (ChromeCast) and also have Staff, Students, ChromeBooks and Guess WLAN's all being on separate VLAN's. Our core switch is a layer 3 and I have turned on IGMP multicast for the interfaces that I want to communicate with the Chromecasts i.e. student's, chromebooks and staff networks can all cast to the chrome cast but guest's cannot....this requires the core switch( router) to have an IP address for each interface (VLAN), the switch is also obviously routing across VLAN's with some ACL's in place for security...Anyway it's a complicated setup but works very well with PFSense as final gateway running a transparent proxy for the ChomeCast network.

 

Mark Edwards
IT Manager
Taipa Area School.
P  09 4060159 ext 222

F  09 4061096
M 021 1252983

www.taipa.school.nz 

 578 SH 10 Taipa, Northland, New Zealand

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[Nick Manning]

http://www.greenbot.com/article/2367592/chromecast-updates-include-mirroring-and-casting-without-wi-fi.html

My work around to get them to work was first create a new SSID on same VLAN as device you wish to have access to the Chromecast. The new SSID used a WPA2 key (instead of WPA2 Enterprise / Radius on existing SSID).

The device then seemed to get stuck registering, I assumed due to our internet filtering rules. To overcome this I would turn off newly created SSID and then from my phone create a Hotspot with matching credentials. The Chromecast would connect to this and register. Once registered it seemed to work fine most of the time.

We are using a CISCO AP solution with a 5508 Series Controller. We also found enabling FlexConnect Local Switching helped.

As for the security without having staff and students on seperate VLAN's we had no way of preventing anyone casting their device. I did hear an upgrade soon will be adding the option of a password before allowing casting.

Regards,

Nick Manning Network and Systems Services E-mail: mann...@ww.catholic.edu.au Phone: 0260406388    Location: 294 Fallon Street / Albury / NSW 2640 Website: www.xhsww.catholic.edu.au Unless explicitly attributed, the opinions expressed in this message are the personal views of the sender and do not necessarily represent the corporate opinion the Catholic Schools Office or the Diocese of Wagga Wagga. If you are not the intended recipient of this email please delete the message and notify the sender. The intended recipient may not forward this email without reference to the sender unless otherwise stated here. Please consider the environment before printing this email

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[Seth Mayo]

Mitch - We run a Ubiquiti Unifi AC wireless AP network on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands.

Blake - Good point - students could re-configure...guessing our teaching staff would take that one quite seriously.  We probably won't have too much of this though because we are a primary only school most (not all) students aren't that clever with IT yet ;-)

Antony - Sounds like we've had similar experiences.  Glad I'm not the only one!

Mark - IGMP/more complex routing very well might help me out.  I'll see if we can get this happening between our student and staff wireless networks.  If so, you might have just solved my problem!  I'll keep everyone posted on how I go with this one...

Nick - what an interesting link!  This might help - I'm really curious how it works / is achieved but very glad they are looking to change things to go more direct like that - I'm guessing it will help many scenarios.

Thanks so much for your support and responses everyone!  It is great to hear of the different implementations, successes and troubles.

Seth Mayo
IT Technical Manager
DID: 02 8203 1368