iPhone - WaveLAN

Hoku

Eduroam stopped working for me too last week, but it turns out my password got "out of sync" with the main servers. I went to selfpass.ucd.ie (after a few days of being redirected between different IT support groups) and changing the password solved my problem. I have iOS 4.1 by the way, and that's the only issue I had with Eduroam this year.

As for WaveLAN - I manage to connect to it the odd time, but rarely. You might as well click "Forget Network" to save your battery trying to connect to it all the time.

baspower

the IT guys should come up with something, imho....

ironclaw

baspower wrote: »

the IT guys should come up with something, imho....

Its not an IT problem I think. Its on the iOS side of things, so to be fair to the IT folks, there isn't much they can do. If anything its probably a blessing as it reduces mobile load.

Anyone know if the iPad OS's are affected?

Sad Professor

The iPad is still using iOS v3.x so I assume it's okay for now.

bnt

Well, I've been tempted to run a network analyzer on my netbook, sniff all the iPod's traffic, so I can see what the thing is trying to do. IT departments tend to frown on that sort of thing, though ... :cool:

ironclaw

bnt wrote: »

Well, I've been tempted to run a network analyzer on my netbook, sniff all the iPod's traffic, so I can see what the thing is trying to do. IT departments tend to frown on that sort of thing, though ... :cool:

Sniffing traffic, as in your own traffic, is perfectly legal.

bnt

ironclaw wrote: »

Sniffing traffic, as in your own traffic, is perfectly legal.

I'm not concerned about "legal", and I'm sorted for now: it's more to do with professional courtesy. Nice guys don't run in "promiscuous mode", you might say. Say I was to find out that e.g. the iPod is trying to ping gs.apple.com - what then? Walk up to the IT desk and tell them to reconfigure the firewall..? :pac:

OTNiner

In relation to iOS 4 there is a different config required for eduroam in UCD.

A change in the way the it handles certs.

I have attached one that worked for me.

Any feedback would be appreciated

baspower

thanks otniner...eduroam's perfect....any similar solution/workaround for wavelan?

ironclaw

baspower wrote: »

thanks otniner...eduroam's perfect....any similar solution/workaround for wavelan?

Eudoroam and WaveLAN are very different networks. With 4.2 on the way, we might see a breakthrough before Xmas.

yehthatguy

Im using an iPod on v3.x and it works fine, just takes a min or two to connect so it must be an issue with the software

Improbable

iOS4 completely screwed things up for me. Downgraded to 3 and wavelan works like a charm.

hshortt

Ehhh... didn't see a problem myself. With the correct proxy both an iPad on 3.2.1 and a 3GS iPhone on 4.0.1 connect no bother.

Given that I'm an evening student, I wonder if it might be down to available addresses during the day? DHCP lease could be set too long.

bnt

hshortt wrote: »

Ehhh... didn't see a problem myself. With the correct proxy both an iPad on 3.2.1 and a 3GS iPhone on 4.0.1 connect no bother.

Given that I'm an evening student, I wonder if it might be down to available addresses during the day? DHCP lease could be set too long.

In my case, and based on what I've heard here and elsewhere (including the IT Desk), this is definitely not a DHCP issue, but it's specific to iOS 4.x. I would always see a valid IP address, but something else was preventing the connection coming up. You can find problem reports elsewhere about iOS 4.x and proxies e.g. this. (I did try the proxy IP address instead of DNS name - seemed to work for a bit, then nothing. Ditto for adding login credentials for the proxy.) Now I'm back on OS 3.0 on the iPod Touch, the connection is marked up as soon as it gets the IP address, but there's still that old lag before e.g. Safari can get out past the Proxy to the Internet. Not a big deal.

OTNiner

DHCP pool expiry does not appear to be a cause of the root issue but may be a factor in some connectivity issues.

Science complex and Newman / Arts Annex are experiencing pool depletion, this is being worked on.

It appears that from iOS4 following recipt of a valid IP configuration the iPhone / iTouch attempt to connect to www.apple.com (directly) over http on port 80.

After sucessive failurers it then appears to try and connect to apple.com through the proxy (if configured), at this point the symbol for network connectivity changes from the circle to the radio wave symbol and browsing starts to work.

This process can take 2 - 3 Minutes.

Other apps may still fail if they do not respect the proxy configuration which appears to be a common occurance.

The proxy configuration should be:

Method Manual
Server proxy.ucd.ie
port (either) 8484 or 8585

This is not to say there are not other issues at play as reported in various treads i.e. poor reception etc.

robo

OTNiner wrote: »

DHCP pool expiry does not appear to be a cause of the root issue but may be a factor in some connectivity issues.

Science complex and Newman / Arts Annex are experiencing pool depletion, this is being worked on.

It appears that from iOS4 following recipt of a valid IP configuration the iPhone / iTouch attempt to connect to www.apple.com (directly) over http on port 80.

After sucessive failurers it then appears to try and connect to apple.com through the proxy (if configured), at this point the symbol for network connectivity changes from the circle to the radio wave symbol and browsing starts to work.

This process can take 2 - 3 Minutes.

Other apps may still fail if they do not respect the proxy configuration which appears to be a common occurance.

The proxy configuration should be:

Method Manual
Server proxy.ucd.ie
port (either) 8484 or 8585

This is not to say there are not other issues at play as reported in various treads i.e. poor reception etc.

Should you also put in the student ID and password for this to work?

bnt

OTNiner wrote: »

It appears that from iOS4 following recipt of a valid IP configuration the iPhone / iTouch attempt to connect to www.apple.com (directly) over http on port 80.

After sucessive failurers it then appears to try and connect to apple.com through the proxy (if configured), at this point the symbol for network connectivity changes from the circle to the radio wave symbol and browsing starts to work.

This process can take 2 - 3 Minutes.

The problem I had was that this almost never happened. A couple of times in the Library, when I thought I had cracked it (see prev. page), but then it just stopped working entirely, no matter how long I waited or what I tried (different buildings including Richview, proxy IP address instead of name, automatic configration URL, providing login credentials, etc.). For example, I read an ebook for an hour, wireless on the whole time with no standby, and it never connected. It had a valid IP address, but never indicated that it was connected, the whole hour. Between that and Eduroam ceasing to work, that was when I made the decision to downgrade to 3.x, which I have not regretted. You don't need to tell us what procedures to try, we've tried them all already.

OTNiner

Further analysis points to the iOS utility for use with “captive portal” wireless networks. Basically on connection to an open i.e. unauthenticated wireless network the device will attempt to retrieve “success.html” from http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html

Failure causes the device to renew DHCP and try again approx every 2 Minutes.

This behaviour introduced in iOS 3.x is documented at:

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/31/66812-iphone-3-0-wireless-captive-portal-support.html

http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/25401-how-disable-os3-0s-wifi-auto-login-feature.html

Further testing with iOS 4.1 on a couple of different devices show them sometimes connecting to the WaveLAN Network, it appears that particular applications can cause the device to recognise that it has a valid network connection if they run in the period between failure to retrieve the url and the DHCP renew, one of which is the default mail application if configured to connect to ucd mail via imap.

Initial testing indicates that the current version of the boingo app referenced as a way to disable this mode of operation doesn’t do it on iOS4.1 but could be worth trying.

Using the ip address of the proxy instead of the name should not make any difference and you should not configure username and passwords, UCD’s proxy servers are not configured for authentication and most browsers will transmit the credentials in clear thus vulnerable.

Getting DNS to lie and return the IP address of a locally accessible server hosting the relevant content would address the issue but at the cost of making www.apple.com inaccessible, is probably not a viable workaround.

As individual apps can chose to respect or disregard the proxy if configured eduroam is the best solution and it is planned to roll this out to all locations that the infrastructure supports it over the coming months.

Any feedback post here or PM me

bnt

Well, my first reactions:

• Yikes!
• a few choice swearwords in the general direction of Cupertino;
• a big Thank You for taking the time to investigate the situation in detail!

I did suspect that there was some kind of polling going on, but I didn't know the half of it ...

PS: that iphonesdk forum has been flagged by Google as linking to malware and infecting machines.

bnt

But now I've had a chance to look at the MacTalk article, I have more questions:

• Is WaveLAN a "captive" network? I've never seen a login screen of the sort described.
• The problems we're having are definitely only happening with iOS 4.x, and not with OS 3.x. I'm not familar with "boingo", but I'm curious to hear if anyone else has luck with that Mail trick mentioned.

Sad Professor

I reckon I may have done the Mail trick without realising it. I've been messing around all week and I successfully connected a few times but was unable to figure out how to do it again.

OTNiner

WaveLAN is not a captive network in the sense of the iOS feature, i.e. it does not redirect you to a login / acceptance page before granting access. However as direct access to the internet is not available and the featur does not use proxy settings even if configured it decides that it has no network access despite having received a valid ip configuration via DHCP over the network:)

Awaiting an iOS 3 device to try and figure out the difference between that and 4.1

Pigwidgeon

It's working for me now in the library.

bnt

So, to verify Internet access it polls Apple by HTTP, and doesn't use the HTTP proxy you configured ... but lets you make an IMAP connection? Nice testing, Apple.

(I don't use POP or IMAP on the iPod - instead, I set up the Exchange client to talk to m.google.com, which handles Gmail and syncs contacts & appointments.)

OTNiner

Below are http decodes of the agent polling apple.

iPhone: iOS 4.1

GET /library/test/success.html HTTP/1.0
Host: www.apple.com
User-Agent: CaptiveNetworkSupport-157.1 wispr
Connection: close

iPad: iOS 3.2.2

GET /library/test/success.html HTTP/1.0
Host: www.apple.com
User-Agent: CaptiveNetworkSupport-122.3 wispr
Connection: close

It appears that the later version (s) i.e. 157.1 interact with the OS differently and cause the device to think it does not have a valid network connection, which then initiates a network reset and the process starts all over again.

An undesirable side effect of this is that I would think it adversely affects the battery life of the device as the WLAN interface is constantly transmitting. Until (if) a workaround can be identified and implemented it might be advisable to disable the WLAN interface when in UCD.

Sad Professor

iOS 4.2 seems to fix this problem. I haven't had any problems connecting so far this morning. I'm using the 4.2 GM btw.

EDIT: it's a bit slow to connect, takes about a minute.

baspower

that's good news....i'll try it out the gm as well.....heard d public release would be around 9-12nov...

baspower

EDIT: am just gonna wait till 4.2 final hits public....anyone else tried 4.2 gm yet?

alan4cult

iOS 4.2 is out now, so I'll have a try tonight to see can I get it to work in UCD. Hopefully it will solve the problem.

Hoku

Just as Sad Professor reported with the GM release... Just tried out the public release and it works, but takes about a minute to connect.
I suppose it's better than not connecting at all.