394. Eduroam using wicd and network-manager

Eduroam is a "secure international roaming service" which is used by a great number of universities in Europe, the US and Australia, as well as being used by a limited number of campuses in Asia and Africa.

It's a pretty neat idea since there's frequent exchange of visitors between universities (visiting researchers, seminar speakers, PhD students visiting to do measurements etc.). Getting an account to set up with IT for a temporary user is too much hassle -- and this takes care of that.

While Eduroam might be implemented slightly different on different campuses, this is what I've had luck with in Melbourne (https://wiki.aarnet.edu.au/display/eduroam/For+End+Users).

Here are a couple of screenshots and instructions for network-manager and wicd

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network-manager

Security:             WPA & WPA2 Enterprise
Authentication:       Protected EAP (PEAP)
Anon. Identity:
CA certificate: 
Inner Authentication:  MSCHAPv2
Username:              uniusername
Password:              password

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Wicd
I wiped my laptop a month or two ago and hadn't bothered reconnecting to eduroam after that, so when setting it up in wicd I first tried creating a script in /etc/wicd/encryption/templates, which I activated by including it in /etc/wicd/encryption/templates/active. I kept on getting 'bad password' errors though. Note that I've had no success whatsoever connecting to any network using wicd in virtualbox. What I show below works on physical hardware (i.e. my Thinkpad SL410) though.

Anyway, simple: click on Properties for the eduroam network you want to connect to, and set it up as shown below (version 1.7.2 as found in Wheezy)

For Encryption, pick PEAP with TKIP/MSCHAPv2, and input your university username and password.

You don't need to use the CA cert, so if you don't have access to the eduroam CA cert, don't worry, and don't include it (it improves security though).

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Android
As a bonus, here are the settings in android.

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Links to this post:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=345087

82. Getting rid of network-manager (and trying wicd) on Debian Testing

Network-manager is a fine program, but it interferes with the 'linux' way of doing things by using text files for configuration.

While network-manager makes it easy to do easy things,  /etc/network/interfaces makes it easy to do everything since it makes every setting transparent.

The main problem with remove network-manager is that gnome-core depends on it. Remove network-manager, everything in gnome goes. No good, and completely unnecessary.

I'm still a bit hesitant about configuring WPA on the command line, so I want to have wicd as a backup once network manager is gone.

--START HERE --
So
sudo apt-get install wicd-cli wicd-curses wicd-gtk wpasupplicant

Turn off network-manager (temporarily) and restart your network
sudo service networking restart && sudo service network-manager stop

Start wicd-gtk and configure your wireless network (if that's what you need) to make sure that everything is in working order and you can live without network-manager.

sudo apt-get install rcconf

sudo rcconf

Uncheck network-manager and exit.

update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing
update-rc.d: warning: network-manager start runlevel arguments (none) do not match LSB Default-Start values (2 3 4 5)
update-rc.d: warning: network-manager stop runlevel arguments (0 1 2 3 4 5 6) do not match LSB Default-Stop values (0 1 6)

You can use sysv-rc-conf instead.  Don't worry about the warning about the LSB default -start values -- (2 3 4 5) just means that by default network-manager should be running at runlevels 2-5 (i.e. normal operation). 0 would be halt, 1 would effectively be rescue mode ('single-user mode') and 6 is system reboot. Anyway, here's sysv-rc-conf:

After your next reboot you can check whether network-manager has started:

sudo service network-manager status

[sudo] password for me:
NetworkManager is not running ... failed!

You can make wicd-gtk autostart on starting gnome:
start gnome-sessions-manager and add wicd-gtk if it isn't /already/ there.

The wicd network manager icon will show up in the notification area in gnome (lower right) instead of top right (see picture above). You can supposedly use this to move it: http://blog.norida.me/blog/2011/12/05/move-wicds-icon-to-gnome-shells-status-bar-top-bar/

Given that I use Faenza I also use this: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Faenza+Wicd+Iconset?content=133821
(unzip it, go to the directory and do sh install )


Anyway, the real advantage of wicd is hat there are cli and curses versions available e.g. wicd-curses:

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Links to this post:
http://eulez.blogspot.com.es/2013/07/de-ubuntu-debian.html