connecting a nokia with symbian os to the eduroam network

Have you had problems connecting your nokia phone running the symbian os to the eduroam network?

I remember trying to connect my nokia e63 to the eduroam network and struggling with it for days, there was a very detailed manual on how to set up the symbian os for the eduroam network and at one glance it seemed fairly easy.

However, it was a big headache getting it to work. I tried in vain a number of times and I knew something was missing. I will try to list the steps below on how to get connected. In my case I found that it was the AddTrust certificate that was missing, the trick is to get the correct certificate and upload it to your phone and get your phone to accept it.

First, update your phone software to the latest version and that should include all the certificates you need, if the relevant certificate is missing you will have to find, download and manually load that on to your phone.

Connect your symbian phone to your computer and update it using the nokia ovi suite or pc suite whichever version you are using. A note of caution here, make sure your phone is fully charged before you do this.

After this is done follow the instructions on the eduroam setup page of your university, these instructions are mostly the same, in case you need to go through them again, I am listing the instructions here, please check if there is any difference with your university's instruction page.

Go to your phone menu

• open tools

• go to settings

• go to connection

 

• open access points

• click on options and open 'new access point'

• change 'connection name' to Eduroam
• change 'data bearer' to wireless lan

• change 'access point' name to eduroam
• change the 'WLAN network name' to eduroam
• Set the 'Network status' to Public

• Set the 'WLAN network mode' to Infrastructure
• Set the 'WLAN security mode' to WPA/WPA2
• Select 'WLAN security settings' to open the next menu

• Set 'WPA/WPA2' to EAP .Set the 'WPA2 only mode' to off

• Select 'EAP plug-in settings' to open the next menu
• Using the 'Options' menu, disable all the EAP types except EAP-TTLS (so that only EAP-TTLS has a tick next to it.Select 'EAP-TTLS'

• open the 'Options' menu, and choose 'Configure'
• In the 'EAP-TTLS' screen, on the 'General' tab:
• Leave 'User or Personal certificate' as not defined
• Select 'CA certificate', and choose AddTrust Global Root (it was at this point that I found out that I did not have the AddTrust Global Root certificate, if this is the case with your phone you will have to download the certificate from the link given at the bottom of this post or here and here and add it to your list of certificates)
• Set 'User name in use' to User-configured or user defined

• Set 'User name' to to your username in the following format: yourname@abcd.ac.uk or yourname@admin.abcd.ac.uk (replace abcd with your university's address)
• Set 'Realm in use' to User-configured or User defined
• Leave 'Realm' blank

• Change to the 'EAP' tab, by moving right
• In the 'EAP-TTLS' screen, on the 'EAP' tab:
• Using the 'Options' menu, disable all the EAP inner types except MSCHAPv2 (so that only MSCHAPv2 has a tick next to it

•  Select 'MSCHAPv2', open the 'Options' menu, and choose 'Configure'
• Set 'User name' to your university username with @abcd.ac.uk appended, e.g yourname@universityname.ac.uk
• Set 'Prompt password' to No
• Set 'Password' to your normal ISS password (remember, it is case sensitive)

• Press the 'Back' button
• In the 'Cipher' tab you can leave everything at the default settings

• Now press the 'Back' button as many times as is needed to return to the main menu
• Open up the 'Web' browser application, and try to visit a web page such as google.com
• When prompted to 'Select access point', choose eduroam from the list. The device should connect, and then the web page should load!

Download the certificate file in .cer format from here and in .crt format from here these links will take you to my skydrive and you can download using the download button on the right. Alternatively you can download the .cer file from fileden here

you can use your computer or phone to download the files. If you are using your computer you will have to transfer the files from the computer to the phone memory and click/open the file to load it to the list of certificates.

The screenshots were from my Nokia e63 phone, I hope you are able to connect now, if you are still  having problems, you can list the details of the connection problems you are having in the comments section  below and I will try to work out a solution.

My next effort is to connect the kindle to the eduroam network :)

How to crimp an RJ45 network connector

Although wired networks are fast becoming obsolete, with the proliferation of wifi routers and modems having built in wifi routing capability, there are still many situations where a wired network still makes sense, especially if you are concerned about hackers snooping on your network or if you just want a plain old wired network. So if you are setting up a network at home one of the important parts of your network would consist of that small nondescript component connected to a wire known as an RJ45 connector. Connecting the connector to the CAT5 or CAT6 cable is quite simple once you get the hang of it, but you have to keep in mind the sequence of colour code, I am going to highlight the basic – straight and crossover - crimping method and colour code here. This is a topic that has been covered in many sites, I just want to include the basic pictorial info without too much technical jargon.

You can buy pre crimped network cables, but you won’t get the exact length that you may want. If you want to crimp your own or if you just want to know how it should be done, read on.

You will need:

1). A pair of RJ45 crimpers, don’t buy the cheap ones unless you plan to use them only once or twice, get a good quality pair and you won’t regret the small investment.

Crimping tool for RJ45 (network) and RJ11 (telephone) connectors


2). RJ45 connectors


A pair of RJ45 Connectors

3). CAT5 (or CAT5E or CAT6) Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) Cable (the length will depend on how far away is the network hub from your workstation)

Cut the wire to the desired length then strip off about half an inch to expose the twisted pairs of wire there should be four twisted pairs making a total of eight different colours of wire. Do not strip off too much of the wire

After you have done this, untwist the half inch exposed pairs, flatten them and cut them with a wire cutter so that they are even at the edges.

Do not expose too much of the wire, this will result in data transmission problems, the picture below shows you how it should NOT be done



DO NOT make this mistake



For straight crimping, i.e., if you want to connect a desktop or a laptop to a network hub port, you will have to follow the 568B standard or more technically TIA/EIA-568-B standard. On both the ends of the cable the crimping has to follow the same colour code

568B Colour Code

For crossover crimping,

i.e., if you want to connect one computer with another

or link one hub with another hub

or link an adsl modem to a network hub, you will have to adopt the 568A or TIA/EIA-568-A standard on one end and the 568B or TIA/EIA-568-B standard on the other, so the ends of your wire should be connected like this



568-A to 568-B Crossover crimping



This is the pin position on the RJ45 connector

This is how the end product should roughly look like 

I hope this helps you with your network!

The importance of data backup

If you have been thinking of backing up your data do it now!

Its been quite a while since I posted anything here, fact is I had completely forgotten about this blog. It was from the days when I would blog about anything, but the pressures of work were just too much to allow me to even think about writing anything interesting. Since this blog brings back some memories from the past, I recollect an incident that reinforced the idea of always backing up your data. When my laptop crashed with a whole lot of important data that had not been backed up.

Today with all kinds of storage solutions available and prices coming down on a daily basis, its so easy to just store your data in your computer and forget about it, cloud computing is also opening up a totally new avenue of computing. But, I cannot overemphasise the importance of backing up your data.

If you have about 1gb of important data minus the music and the movies, back that up in a dvd or a pendrive and make sure you store them properly in a safe place. The price of a dvd or pendrive is ridiculously cheap now, and if you are not paranoid about privacy you can even store your files in your email as attachments, that way you will always have access to them (provided of course you are connected to the net). Gmail offers more than 7GB of free storage space, download and install a utility named 'gmail drive' this will show up as another drive on 'my computer' and of course you have to be online to be able to download or upload files from this drive.

With 1TB being the standard hard disk on home computers today, there is plenty of room to store anything and everything, but an average home computer user would not have more than 1GB of important data, in the form of word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentations or some other file format. The rest of the space is usually taken up by music, movies and other kinds of multimedia files. Always back up your important files and by important I don't mean music or movies that you can purchase again, but the critical files that would cause you a great deal of trauma and harm if they were lost.

I remember by Toshiba Satellite MX111 with a 40gb hard drive, 256mb ram, running winxp home, I was using this machine to edit a magazine. All the pictures that had been taken and edited were stored in the hard drive and were deleted from the camera, all the articles had been typed from hand written notes or transferred from cds and pendrives and also stored in the same hard drive and the work was almost complete. Those were the days of pagemaker and photoshop and eveyrthing was painstakingly compiled on pagemaker. I remember thinking that I should back up the data just in case, but I shrugged the thought away. Since the work was almost done I decided to take a break and started updating spybot an anti spyware programme I had installed, after a few minutes i remember a friend who was in the office asking me if he should restart the laptop as the update was complete, I told him to go ahead and then I heard him saying that, its not responding, after it failed to respond to all efforts the only obvious solution was to press hard on the power button and do a hard reset, never expecting that it would fail to start. Well that was what it did, then the panic started. The OS had crashed and there were too many system files missing, the recovery dvd that came with the laptop was designed to wipe everything and reinstall a fresh copy of xp which would not serve my purpose at all. To cut a long story short, I worked through the night and finally was able to carve out a 3gb partition from the 40gb hard disk using 'bootit ng' an excellent partitioning utility which I still use today. A fresh copy of windows xp was installed on the new partition which was used to access the files on the other partition and recover the all important unbacked-up files. I cannot explain the anxiety and fear of having lost everything, its definitely something that is to be avoided at all costs.

We've come a long way since xp but an OS will still crash, so if you are reading this, go ahead and backup that data, at least the important ones and save yourself the trauma and hair tearing.