Connecting to Wifi

UniWide - UNSW Wireless Network

UniWide is the UNSW campus-wide wireless network for all staff and students, maintained by UNSW IT - contact them directly for support.

Network SSID

uniwide

Username

Your zID

Password

Your zPass

For more information, see these guides for students and staff.

Eduroam

UNSW is part of the global eduroam network.

Eduroam lets visiting staff and students from participating universities connect to wifi using their credentials from their home campus.

Network SSID

eduroam

Username

yourusername@yourcampusdomain

Password

Your home-campus password

There are a limited number of Eduroam connections on campus, so we recommend that you used Uniwide instead where possible.

UniWide Guest Access

Uniwide Guest access (for events, conferences and short-term visitors) can be arranged via the self-service portal at UNSW IT.

UNSW Staff coordinating these events must register for this service in advance, before their guests arrive.

Unrouted network for devices

There is a special-purpose network for devices that can't use zID/zPass authentication.

This is typically used for special projects (robots, remote sensors, etc.), not for general use.

If you need access to this network, contact System Support.

Manual configuration of wpa_supplicant for accessing UNSW wifi

wpa_supplicant is the daemon which talks via the wireless interface to the back-end wifi servers and which handles protocol negotiations, authentication, etc.

Connecting to wifi from "dumb" devices and useless kiosks -- such as Raspberry Pi's without a GUI and robots -- requires some element of manual configuration.

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Here's a configuration file for wpa_supplicant on a Raspberry Pi 4B running Debian Bookworm:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=AU

network={
	ssid="uniwide"
	priority=1
	proto=RSN
	key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
	pairwise=CCMP
	auth_alg=OPEN
	eap=PEAP
	identity="z1234567"
	password="YourPassword"
	phase1="peaplabel=0"
	phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

Operation / configuration

• Disable and stop the wpasupplicant service. On Bookworm it uses dbus to get the interface list and this requires more smarts (and presumably a GUI/desktop) than are absolutely required:

systemctl disable wpasupplicant
systemctl stop wpasupplicant

• Make any necessary changes to /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf. Usually not required, but you can remove "routers" if you're testing via a wired connection so the default route doesn't get clobbered when the wireless link comes up. Also consider this in the same file:

interface wlan0
env ifwireless = 1
env wpa_supplicant_driver = wext , nl80211

• Update /etc/network/interfaces or similar like this (maybe just use this as inspiration?):

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 net dhcp
 pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -d wext -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
 post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

• Note: may not need the two wext driver references (because wext is old).

• See also YouTube video

• See also also Another page

• See also also also Another old page