Connecting to Eduroam

[Dylan]

I have been trying to figure out how to connect to Eduroam on my nano-gateway and still having some trouble. I have used all the examples in the WLAN docs but I believe I need to change stuff in the main.py as well as the config.py. Was hoping there was something as straight forward as:
WIFI_SSID = 'eduroam'
WIFI_AUTH = 'username'
WIFI_PASS = 'pass'

But it doesn't seem to be the case.

I've been searching for python examples but only found how to connect a Linux system. Eduroam is basically everywhere so I'm sure this answer will be well used.

Cheers,

Dylan

[jmarcelino]

@dylan
Eduroam is a WPA2 Enterprise network. You need to change the WLAN initialisation to it, see the Connecting with EAP-PEAP or EAP-TTLS example:

https://docs.pycom.io/chapter/tutorials/all/wlan.html

I think for Eduroam your username and the identity are your e-mail address. You shouldn't need to have the ca_certs option.

As a quick test change line 207 in nanogateway.py (under _connect_to_wifi function) from

self.wlan.connect(self.ssid, auth=(None, self.password))

to:

self.wlan.connect(ssid='eduoram', auth=(WLAN.WPA2_ENT, 'youremail', 'password'), identity='youremail')

Of course in this replacing the placeholder fields your e-mail and password respectively.

I not sure this will work as I've not used eduroam in a few years so any feedback would be appreciated.

[Dylan]

@jmarcelino thanks for the reply, I suspected it had something to do with the WPA2 Enterprise network just no idea how to implement it, cheers for the help. I am still having trouble with what placeholders to put in? I put the WPA2 Enterprise stuff (wlan.connect etc) into the config file, but I believe I need to change stuff in the main too, sorry for lack of explanation, gotta go out for a bit and wanted to get this post out.

[jmarcelino]

@dylan
You need to change nanogateway.py, changing config.py won’t do anything.

For a quick test just put the values directly on the self.wlan.connect(...) call , if it works we’ll change it to pick them up from config.py

[Dylan]

@jmarcelino I found where I made my mistake earlier, the password is case sensitive haha. Its connected and working well.

Thanks for the help

[franman]

@jmarcelino
I have followed the section "Connecting with EAP-PEAP or EAP-TTLS" of https://docs.pycom.io/chapter/tutorials/all/wlan.html, and your comments @jmarcelino , but I can't connect my LoPy to Eduroam. Is it possible that the authentication method will be important? In my university the authentication method is EAP-MSCHAP-V2, and my question is: Is this method supported by LoPy?

[livius]

@franman
How your connection looks like?
I suppose you do not provide any cert as it is not needed on client side for EAP-MSCHAP-V2
and are you sure that it is not PEAP-EAP-MSCHAPv2?

[franman]

@livius I try connect with the following command:

wlan.connect(ssid="eduroam",auth=WLAN.WPA2_ENT,EDUROAM_USER,EDUROAM_PWD),identity=EDUROAM_IDENTITY,timeout=5000)

Where:

• EDUROAM_USER = my email address
• EDUROAM_PWD = my eduroam passwd
• and EDUROAM_IDENTITY = my email address too.

And yes, as the document to configure eduroam in my university says, the authentication mechanism is EAP-MSCHAP-V2.(an screenshot of the web, unfortunally in spanish, is attached)

[thomand1000]

It seems as some of you got it to work. Can you please provide a short guide with some code that worked?

Thanks

[Dylan]

@thomand1000 Unfortunately I didn't get it entirely fixed, the best theory is that the Eduroam has a UDP timeout feature, I did find a work around that has been working consistently, it gives a maximum of about 30 seconds downtime every 31minutes.

The few things I changed are in the nanogateway.py file for the gateway example:

After 1900 seconds the message "Failed to pull downlink packets from server" would occur so I put a machin.reset() in:

def _pull_data(self):
    token = uos.urandom(2)
    packet = bytes([PROTOCOL_VERSION]) + token + bytes([PULL_DATA]) + ubinascii.unhexlify(self.id)
    with self.udp_lock:
        try:
            self.sock.sendto(packet, self.server_ip)
        except Exception as ex:
            machine.reset()
            self._log('Failed to pull downlink packets from server: {}', ex)

And every 4-5th restart it would just not connect so I did a simple timer reset in the wifi connection:

def _connect_to_wifi(self):
    count = 0
    self.wlan.connect(ssid='eduroam', auth=(WLAN.WPA2_ENT, 'Username', 'Password'), identity='Username', timeout = 30)
    while not self.wlan.isconnected():
        utime.sleep(1)
        count = count + 1
        print(count)
        if count >= 30:
            machine.reset()
    self._log('WiFi connected to: {}', self.ssid)

Hopefully one day I'll be able to get the UDP timeout thing properly fixed, but they don't change things like this in a hurry for a student haha.