Notify when somebody new connects to WiFi?

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jtpryan123 wrote:

But we would like to know when somebody joins our WiFi network for the first time.  I don't want it enforce MAC filtering as I support this company as a side gig and it would just be something else I need to investigage everytime one of the employees conncects a new device.

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Trouble is that decent wireless clients make use of randomized MAC addresses by default (unless disabled by SSID on the client side typically) so you find plenty of "new" somebodies almost every day. And when you investigate, you find it's just the same Windows, Mac, iOS or Android device again, coming in with a new random MAC address.

Typical wireless access points (and this includes business class units from any brand as far as I'm awere of) store some of the recent connected MAC in volatile memory, and tend to forget these e.g. on a cold boot. From the design prospective, there is simply not the amount of storage to remember virtually endless or unlimited amounts of MAC addresses, so hard to find if there is a new one in use.

If you really want the detection of new devices, you need to challenge all the users to configure the wireless clients not using random MAC addresses, and set-up some monitoring which keeps track of wireless associations. Netgear Insight can do this so some extent, the notifications can keep track of associations, re-associations, roaming, .... but it won't tell you if this is an previously visible MAC or a new MAC.