Network-Driven Automated Attendance and Departmental Access Control for University Computer Laboratories Using DHCP Log Parsing, VLAN Segmentation, and Cloud Deployment

University computer laboratories continue to rely on paper-based attendance registers, a practice that introduces proxy fraud, administrative overhead, and an absence of real-time visibility. That paper present the design, implementations, and evaluations of a Smart Attendance and Lab Access System that eliminates these deficiencies through passive network monitoring. When a student's registered device joins the laboratory Wi-Fi, the DHCP server generates a lease record containing the device MAC address. A continuously executing Python agent intercepts these records, matches them against a pre-enrolled MAC registry stored in a MySQL database hosted on an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance, and writes a time-stamped session entry. Departmental access control is enforced at the network layer through VLAN segmentation and Access Control Lists configured on the laboratory router; cross-departmental connection attempts are denied, logged, and reported to the Head of Department by automated email. A time-bound session code portal built on Flask provides an equivalent check-in path for students using personal mobile hotspots. A browser-accessible live dashboard presents attendance metrics, occupancy statistics, and a chronological violation log, refreshing automatically every ten seconds. Functional testing across eight scenarios confirms complete automation of the attendance workflow, effective detection and blocking of unauthorized access, and timely alerting with zero missed events for enrolled devices. The system operates on existing Wi-Fi infrastructure without any additional hardware investment. Performance benchmarking yields a median event-processing latency of 0.31 seconds and a dashboard response time of 0.74 seconds on a free-tier cloud instance