University Wireless Service and Linux

The University of Alberta is replacing the old, horribly unreliable wireless system with a new University Wireless Service. If you connect without having set it up, any HTTP request is helpfully redirected to a tutorial on connecting to UWS. OS X and Windows XP+ only, of course.

Somebody at a forum for Asus’ new Eee PC has posted how to get it working under Linux:

ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

network={
  ssid="UWS"
  scan_ssid=1
  key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
  eap=PEAP
  identity="your CCID"
  password="your-password"
  phase1="peaplabel=0"
  phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
  priority=1 
}

Putting that in my /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and setting up Gentoo to use wpa_supplicant instead of wireless-tools has got UWS working beautifully (and solved some problems I was having with DHCP, too).

The new network is pretty nice. They’ve upgraded from 802.11b to g, there’s good coverage, it doesn’t randomly drop my connection and there’s less firewalling - I don’t have to tunnel my XMPP connections through SSH anymore.