Meadows said there was a significant level of "lengthy discussions" with Cisco to get it to disable the reset button, which was a requirement to avoid the settings being undone by 350 school technicians.

"This was a world-first to get Cisco to change IOS [and] the deal would have been almost off if they hadn't," she said.

DET also delivered another lesson during the development of EduPass when the vender proffered its own management appliance to do the job.

"Cisco was going to be the central management box, but it couldn't do NAT traversal and we NAT up to six times, so the device could not cope," Meadows said. "It was two hours programming on our part" against A$30,000 worth of appliances from the vendor.

With the EduPass design and development done, 1700 Linux and AMD-based "black boxes" are now running in nearly every school in Victoria. Neither Microsoft nor Intel were impressed "but it happened", Meadows said, adding this is almost certainly the largest unified enterprise wireless network in the world.