Tag Archives: Wireless

Why eduroam?

Eduroam is a secure worldwide federated network developed for the research and education community. Participants in eduroam can connect to this network at other institutions by using their home credentials; there is no need for the institution they are visiting to grant them access explicitly. There are currently 564 institutions participating in eduroam including OSU, UO, OHSU, PSU and SOU.

Connecting to eduroam first at the home institution is recommended as any issues with authentication or the certificate can be addressed by on-site staff.

At OSU, the eduroam network is configured exactly like the OSU_Secure network. If we help our users connect to eduroam here and use it as their default wireless network, they will be able to connect to eduroam at any location where it is provided.

Some universities have dropped their institutional WPA network in favor of using eduroam only. OSU may take this route in the future as well. For now, please make users aware of the advantages of using eduroam. They are free to use OSU_Secure instead if they prefer to do so but there is no technical reason that they should.

For more information about eduroam, see:

Call Center Digest – 12/22/2015

I haven’t done a digest for a long time, so this one has a lot of info in it. Sorry for the lengthy update. On the other hand, it goes to show we have been very busy this past month.


RoboBaseLead Lives!

In case you were wondering, Max C. is alive and well and recovering. Don’t let him work, though!

Upcoming Changes
12/28/2015 @ 6AM – BeaverPrint upgrade; brief down-time during upgrade, but no user impact expected afterward. Change log of new features available here.
12/31-1/4 – CAPS will be moving to new offices and to the new core network. Jon Dowd and Max Schmidt will be on-site.
1/1/2016 – OSU Library Worldcat and FirstSearch will be migrating to OCLC’s new Discovery Platform (seeTraining info here).
1/8 -1/26/2016 – PeopleAdmin (OSU’s online hiring system) will be upgraded. No new recruitments can be started during this two week period. Questions? Business Center.
12/28/2016 – The old ONID SSO service will be retired. Identity & Access Management (IAM) worked with CWS and ECampus to set the timeline for this change. Please note this change is 1 year from now.

Unification Project

 1/6/2016 –  We will be doing a few more CN account unifications.
12/2 – 0369701 (16 tickets)
12/9 – 0371338 (25 tickets)
12/16 – 0372849 (42 tickets)
12/21 – 0373476 (3 tickets)

Recent Outages/Incidents

12/9 – Bad MS patch broke Outlook 2010. (0370956).
12/9-12/15 – Outlook Web Access (OWA) search was failing for users on some mail stores. Resolved.
12/10-12/17 – Several printers around campus printed gibberish on entire reams of paper; probably an exploit. Setting ACLs on printers should resolve.
12/17 3:45PM-6:00PM – Kaltura video playback not working from OSU network. Cause unknown, but likely an upstream issue. If this happens again, please collect info and escalate to NOC queue.
12/18 – Many Ecampus students were reporting issues getting in to MyOSU to register for classes. ECampus had some links promoting the MyOSU method, which often breaks for people off-campus. They have updated those links to point to InfOSU, and we have not received any more calls about this.

Recent Changes
12/7 – The Microsoft Home Use Program code was updated; the new code is in the COHO canned response.
12/12 – All Macs in Milne lab were re-imaged as OSX only (no more Bootcamp).
12/15 – ONID CAS Single-sign on modified; no issues reported.
12/15 – College of Engineering unified all of their accounts, including students. COE students now login to COE resources with their ONID account.
12/17 – Shibboleth SSO upgraded; no issues reported.
12/17 – COHO Server maintenance; no issues.
12/19 – Wireless controller upgrades; no issues reported.
12/19 – Name (DNS) server maintenance; no issues reported.
12/19 – Federation.oregonstate.edu (ADFS) upgrade. (This is the login page for Office 365.) People might notice a “Kumo” option the first time they access the page.
12/22 @ 6AM – KAdmNet201 old core router maintenance; no issues reported.

Policy/Procedure Updates

Screen Connect Best Practices: please have customers connect with a code (ideally their username) to prevent other customers accidentally booting the connection. New Screen Connect documentation here: http://itknows.oregonstate.edu/?p=2742http://itknows.oregonstate.edu/?p=2742  (Thank you, Jade!)

Some Random News
NERO (one of our upstream providers) recently joined Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX), which allows NERO to peer directly with several sites including Akamai, Google, Netflix and others.

Emergency Maintenance on OSU_Secure wireless network

Information Services performed emergency maintenance on the OSU_Secure wireless network at 6 AM this morning (Feb. 11th). After the maintenance, Mac and PC laptops should present a warning notification that the security certificate has changed. This is expected behavior; please click through the notification and you should not be presented with the warning again.  If you do receive multiple requests to accept the certificate, please temporarily switch to OSU_Access and let us know.

We do not believe that Smartphones will present a warning based on the testing we have done, but we have not been able to test all platforms and operating systems.

Policy Change – OSU Secure

On Tuesday, February 3rd at 5pm, a TSS domain-wide policy for OSU_Secure wireless will be deployed. What this does is create a wireless profile for OSU_Secure, sets it as the default profile and makes it available prior to Windows logon. Users will have the option to switch to OSU_Access if needed. OSU Extension has been excluded from this change due to potential issues with older access points. Additionally, Microsoft Surface tablets will be excluded from this change due to issues with wireless drivers that do notproperly support Cisco PEAP authentication.

See the link for documentation and troubleshooting details: OSU_Secure GPO Information