NOTE 27 Dec 2019: below may be out-of-date; for up-to-date and for Android instructions, see new post: http://www.orangenarwhals.com/2018/01/connecting-to-harvard-wireless-without-having-to-install-sketchy-things/

OUTDATED (kept as techniques may be useful for troubleshooting)

With your MIT account and your athena password you can connect to the “eduroam” wireless network present in many universities.

Follow KB instructions to add the eduroam via GUI

http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=152599592

Unfortunately for me, I could not “edit” the eduroam connection. Instead I “added” eduroam as a new connection.

Network Connections > Add > Wifi > Create >

Connection Name: FOOBAR

SSID: eduroam

 

 

security: WPA & WPA2 Enterprise

authentication: PEAP

CA Certificate: /etc/ssl/certs/AddTrust_External_Root.pem (this file already existed on my filesystem, I did not need to download it)

Storing the password

When I did the above steps, I could connect to eduroam, but I would have to type in my password each time. This gets annoying especially on unstable connections.

I’m not sure the exact trick, but essentially, use

$ nmcli con status

to find the UUID. Something like “dd4ad68a-dc57-420d-856c-3aca862652a3”

Then create a file,

/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections$ sudo vi FOOBAR-dd4ad68a-dc57-420d-856c-3aca862652a3

Inside the file put the contents as follows.

(Note that this is the same contents as in the “FOOBAR” file in the same folder, that the GUI created for us when we added the eduroam connection in the network-manager in the first step. Except! We we add the line:

password=<yourpassword>

and we change the flag from 1 to 0:

password-flags=0)

[connection]
id=FOOBAR
uuid=dd4ad68a-dc57-420d-856c-3aca862652a3
type=802-11-wireless

[802-11-wireless]
ssid=eduroam
mode=infrastructure
security=802-11-wireless-security

[802-11-wireless-security]
key-mgmt=wpa-eap

[ipv4]
method=auto

[ipv6]
method=auto

[802-1x]
eap=peap;
identity=<your_username>@mit.edu
ca-cert=/etc/ssl/certs/AddTrust_External_Root.pem
phase2-auth=mschapv2
password-flags=0
password=<yourpassword>

Now you should  be able to connect to eduroam by selecting it in the network manager GUI, and it should connect without

To test, try switching to another network and switching back.

Useful commands:

$ sudo restart network-manager
$ nmcli con up id eduroam
$ nmcli con status