eduroam Cardiff Uni and Fedora

This is a rough blog post to help me remember what happened when I first connected to Cardiff’s eduroam network. The tool was a pain, and didn’t support Fedora. After failing to manually install the certificates I gave in and ran it, which presented even more problems.

The tool is from Aruba (now HP) and seems to be part of ClearPass Solution.

The follow the normal steps

1. Connect to ‘CU-Wireless’
2. Head to https://onboard.cardiff.ac.uk
3. Choose ‘Ubuntu (32/64bit)’
   • This results in a shell script that runs a Qt application.
   • It should work on most Linux distros that use NetworkManager

Tool’s Requirement

• X11 - it won’t work in wayland
• Polkit authentication agent running - e.g. lxpolkit More Information

Tool’s Functions

• Extracts certificates included in the same download.
• Moves certificates to /var/quickconnect/<date>
• Created a new network profile at /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/eduroam

SELinux/Troubleshoot

• If can see the eduroam network connection and try to connect but it seems like nothing happens, even with a password (one auto generated).
  • You may need to allow NetworkManager access to /var/quickconnect/<date>/certificate.pk12

31 Aug 2023