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.
