Visitors to UEA need to get their network cards registered in order to access our network. As a more convenient alternative, the technical support manager here suggested that our school buy two or three usb wireless cards which can be pre-registered and loaned to visitors.
Obviously, I'd like to make sure that whatever we get will have a good chance of working for any visitors who arrive with Linux laptops. Hence, any ideas on either of these would be appreciated.
i) suggestions for a usb wireless card that should plug and play with Linux, Macs and Windows. Physical robustness probably a help too.
ii) or is this whole idea a bad one?
Apologies if this 'which wireless card?' thing has been rather done to death here recently. I can't recall anything specifically usb and mac/win interoperable though.
Thanks,
Rob
Rob Grant Lecturer in Development Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant@uea.ac.uk
Rob Grant wrote:
Visitors to UEA need to get their network cards registered in order to access our network. As a more convenient alternative, the technical support manager here suggested that our school buy two or three usb wireless cards which can be pre-registered and loaned to visitors.
Obviously, I'd like to make sure that whatever we get will have a good chance of working for any visitors who arrive with Linux laptops. Hence, any ideas on either of these would be appreciated.
i) suggestions for a usb wireless card that should plug and play with Linux, Macs and Windows. Physical robustness probably a help too.
ii) or is this whole idea a bad one?
Apologies if this 'which wireless card?' thing has been rather done to death here recently. I can't recall anything specifically usb and mac/win interoperable though.
Hi Rob, I'm not sure that you are aware of this, but the first time you connect to the UEA wifi network it asks you to register. I did this the other day with my laptop running ubuntu and it was registered and working straight away (although the registration page says it can take 20mins). I'm not sure how this works for 'guests' at UEA but there used to be a similar system for visitors wanting to use the UEA ethernet network connections. Alternatively, parts of UEA are covered by the Norwich-wide wifi which is free to use, and there are also numerous departmental wifi networks too that are accessible.
Simon
On Monday 18 June 2007 17:02:43 Simon Jude wrote:
Rob Grant wrote:
Visitors to UEA need to get their network cards registered in order to access our network. As a more convenient alternative, the technical support manager here suggested that our school buy two or three usb wireless cards which can be pre-registered and loaned to visitors.
Hi Rob, I'm not sure that you are aware of this, but the first time you connect to the UEA wifi network it asks you to register. I did this the other day with my laptop running ubuntu and it was registered and working straight away (although the registration page says it can take 20mins). I'm not sure how this works for 'guests' at UEA but there used to be a similar system for visitors wanting to use the UEA ethernet network connections. Alternatively, parts of UEA are covered by the Norwich-wide wifi which is free to use, and there are also numerous departmental wifi networks too that are accessible.
You can only register a network device's MAC address if you have a valid UEA network user account. However, a single user account can register more than one device. So Rob, if you register some wireless cards, you (or whoever registers them) would be responsible for whatever use is made of them.
Also note that the University hosts a second wireless network provide by BT OpenZone which visitors can pay a fee to use.
http://www1.uea.ac.uk/print/home/services/units/is/services/itservices/netwo...
(apologies for UEA's ridiculous CMS-generated-ultra-long-just-to-annoy-pretty-much-everybody URLs).
And Simon, did you manage to use netreg.uea.ac.uk with a non-MSIE browser? I'm very impressed ;-)
Cheers, Richard
And Simon, did you manage to use netreg.uea.ac.uk with a non-MSIE browser? I'm very impressed ;-)
Yep, that worked fine, it even identified me as using linux! (just don't tell ITCS I'm running Linux!!! ;-))
Simon
On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 16:38 +0100, Rob Grant wrote:
i) suggestions for a usb wireless card that should plug and play with Linux, Macs and Windows. Physical robustness probably a help too.
ii) or is this whole idea a bad one?
It is going to be a difficult search I am afraid, naturally you want to go the USB route rather than PCMCIA because not all new laptops have PCMCIA.
Of those that work a lot require a firmware image download (which is going to be difficult to do before you get the link up) and/or only work for specific hardware revisions (and it's not easy to buy a specific hardware revision of a card). For the former you could of course stick the firmware with installation instructions on a CD or USB keydrive
Then the range of wireless USB dongles that will play nicely with OSX without lots of fiddling (you mention wanting it to be Mac compatible too) is pretty limited, I am not even sure OSX will let you use a third party card if there is built in wireless hardware available.
Even Windows is a bit of a problem if the machine already has Wireless (and a fair percentage of recent laptops will) as you can get unexpected behaviour by adding an additional card. Even more so if there is no way to make the existing wireless card disappear without disabling the driver in the device manager. And things only get worse if the existing card has a third party connection management bundle of nastiness on the taskbar.
I've tried to help Coffee shops and pubs etc with this sort of set up before and to be honest it is more trouble than it is worth.
Perhaps you should ask the UEA should consider having a area on their MAC registration page where a temporary visitor pass can be granted, perhaps this would have restricted access compared to a fully registered MAC. It just strikes me that offering pe-registered cards for loan effectively weakens the presumed reasoning for having the MAC lockdowns in the first place.
Sorry I usually try to be more positive about the advice I give :-)
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
O Perhaps you should ask the UEA should consider having a area on their MAC registration page where a temporary visitor pass can be granted, perhaps this would have restricted access compared to a fully registered MAC. It just strikes me that offering pe-registered cards for loan effectively weakens the presumed reasoning for having the MAC lockdowns in the first place.
It might be worth checking whether they have this already.
Simon
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Richard Lewis -
Rob Grant -
Simon Jude -
Wayne Stallwood