WiFi Goodness

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Having just received the new iBook logging in to the WiFi network of our university proved to be somewhat frustrating. Like most univerity networks ours is also completely sealed off with paranoid security restrictions.

To get on the network I had to use some account I had received five years ago and never used ever since. Of course I had forgotten my login details but these were easily obtained.

The second frustration that hit us was that the preferred way of connecting to the wireless network involves a making a VPN connection to the network. The university provides a VPN client by Cisco which looks completely un-Macish and useless. One frustration is that it requires you to retype your password on every connect.

The website provided by the university implied that it should also be possible to connect using 802.1X but it was not completely clear how to do this. Not wanting to settle for the horror of VPN, I looked further into the 802.1X issue.
The website also suggest using various proprietary clients to connect using 802.1X but I found out most modern operating systems have it enabled in the network stack. It seems that it is a secure way of connecting to wireless networks which is widely in use on university networks.
I prodded my friend Reinier via MSN to try it out (I was not on the campus so I couldn't) and after some fiddling he managed to get it to work and gave me a terse instruction how to repeat it.

Now I am at the campus and also have gotten it to work and have made a series of screenshots accompanying the process. These steps seem to work for Reinier and me. They may not all be strictly necessary and you can try to use less options or different settings. YMMV.

In the Wireless menu of your Mac you select the WLAN network and then Open Internet Connect.

In Internet Connect choose File and then New 802.1X Connection.

In the 802.1X tab of Internet Connect we are going to make a new configuration. Don't worry about the details, we are going to fill these in on the next screen.

Give your configuration an appropriate name. As the Network Port select your AirPort. The User Name should be your Service Account User Name + "@tudelft" (I have no clue how Reinier figured this out), the Password is your Service Account Password. The Wireless Network is WLAN and for Authentication you have to use TTLS.

Next we configure the TTLS Authentication to use PAP for Inner Authentication and anonymous@tudelft for Outer Identity.

That's it. Your WiFi internet should be ready to go and you never have to use a stinking VPN client anymore.

Made by alper at 2005-10-14 15:25 | Place comment (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Comments

Re: WiFi Goodness

Great! Now I only have to wait for Palm releasing the (firmware) update for my LifeDrive.

Made by: Oliver on October 14,2005 15:44

Re: WiFi Goodness

very recently the X802 server seems to be half broken and expect a relogin at random times. Usually cancelling the login box and re-engaging the airport works. Otherwise, remember your service password and type it in, that has always worked for me so far. Hopefully this is temporary.

sidenote: If all those spiffy animations (minimizing, F12, F9, etc) are going a bit too fast for you, try holding shift while they happen to slow them down. Especially fun is to minimize a playing video window and watch the entire window contort into the genie minimizing shape still playing the video which contorts right along with it, never skipping a beat.

Made by: Reinier Zwitserloot on October 14,2005 18:25

Re: WiFi Goodness

Always nice to see your work wasted. DTO may be careless, there are people who do care.

From Jochem van Dieten I got the next two links which tell just about the same thing as I do above.

Made by: Alper on October 15,2005 14:48

Re: WiFi Goodness

I had sent them an e-mail saying this:

Hallo,

Ik heb pas via de TUDelft actie (http://tudelft.mac.nl) een iBook gekocht. Daarna wilde ik met de mogelijkheden die geboden werden op http://luchthaven.tudelft.nl een draadloze verbinding maken met het netwerk van de TU. Met de VPN client van Cisco lukte dit wel maar niet helemaal naar tevredenheid.

Op de site van luchthaven staat ook een grove instructie over hoe met 802.1X gebruik te maken van het draadloze netwerk. Ik en vrienden hebben uitgezocht hoe dit nu precies moet en ik heb er een beschrijving van neergezet op: http://82.156.122.105/blog/tech/15

De gids is (net zoals de hele rest van het blog) beschikbaar onder een Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Misschien dat het een waardevolle toevoeging zou zijn aan de pagina over het gebruik van luchthaven.

Met vriendelijke groet,

To which I got the following reply:

Oplossing/Solution:
[Call Closed - Resolved
Reason : RFI-Completed
One Liner : Bedankt voor de informatie. Andere handleidingen komen in de toekomst.]
Bedankt voor de informatie. We gaan in de toekomst ook handleidingen voor Mac en Linux maken en kunnen dan jou informatie gebruiken,

To which I then replied again saying this:

Nu zijn er ook mensen die met een handheld device proberen te
verbinden met het Airport netwerk van de TU Delft en die staan dan nog
steeds in de kou.

Deze apparaten hebben meestal geen goede (of gratis) VPN client
beschikbaar en slechte ondersteuning voor het 802.1X protocol. Zou het
een idee zijn om onder een lagere Quality of Service en een hogere
beveiliging toch voor alle clienten open internettoegang mogelijk te
maken? Dit als service voor alle bezoekers van het TU-terrein?

Curious if (and when) they will reply to this.

Made by: Alper on November 14,2005 19:58

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