Taskforce Mobility Mailarchive


Subject Re: SSID eduroam-help
From Tomasz Wolniewicz <twoln@xxxxxx>
Date Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:14:51 +0200

Hi Kurt,
Actually we have been doing that for a while and have stopped.
These are the main reasons:

First of all - hardly anybody used this (could just as well stop the arguments here :) ). Second - existence of a unencrypted network used to fool some devices, like palmtops into connecting to it, even if eduroam was correctly configured. If a break in the transmission occurred the device would automatically go for the open network. Third - changing form the unencrypted network to eduroam required a change of address, this not always worked smoothly. Finally - Windows now tries to warn the user against the unencrypted network, I do not feel good about telling our users to disregard this warning, while in the same time telling them how important it is to use safe networks like eduroam.

Tomasz

Kurt Bauer wrote:
Dear all,

first of all sorry for crossposting, but as this is rather a policy question than a technical one, I wasn't sure which mailinglist would be the ultimate correct one.

We tried to think of various ways to help end-users with problems connecting to eduroam. As a matter of fact, if the user isn't able to get his 802.1x setup working, he has no other way than seeking for help via phone, ie. websites with a lot of FAQs and HowTos are of no help. What a collague of mine came up with is the following: Why not broadcast a SSID 'eduroam-help' which has no security so noone will have a problem connecting to it. In this network, ideally a special VLAN, nothing but HTTP to exactly one site (captive) is allowed. And on this site the user can find all the helpful information he probably needs to get eduroam working, including clients, xml-files for configuring and so on.

Do you think this would be something helpful for eduroam-users ?

And is this something which is somehow compatible with the current policy or could the policy be changed in a way to allow it ?

Thanks for your comments,
best regards,
Kurt


--
Kurt Bauer <kurt.bauer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Vienna University Computer Center - ACOnet - VIX
Universitaetsstrasse 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria, Europe
Tel: ++43 1 4277 - 14070 (Fax: - 9140)  KB1970-RIPE





--
Tomasz Wolniewicz twoln@xxxxxx http://www.home.umk.pl/~twoln

Uczelniane Centrum Informatyczne   Information&Communication Technology Centre
Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika     Nicolaus Copernicus University,
pl. Rapackiego 1, Torun               pl. Rapackiego 1, Torun, Poland
tel: +48-56-611-2750     fax: +48-56-622-1850       tel kom.: +48-693-032-576