PSU Guest WiFi for Linux

Mordac

• 1) Connect your laptop to the SSID PSU Guest

• 2) Fill out the form with your gmail address, connect by email

• 3) Turn OFF wifi on your laptop

• 4) as root, run dhclient -r

• 5) Turn ON wifi again

• 6) Connect to the SSID PSU (not "Guest")

• 7) Surf to gmail, open the message from PSU, click the link

• 8) You are in!

• Look elsewhere for explanations of wifi and linux.
• Modify if needed, but I don't know what will break.
• Yes, this is a kludge, and PSU IT ought to fix it. They may fix it by making the kludge stop working, too.

Explanation

The Portland State University wireless internet network is available to the public - sorta. Other universities are more open:

• Washington State University Vancouver (totally open access)
• OHSU (click "I agree")
• University of Washington Seattle (get a 3 month password at the ground floor information desk at Allen Library)

• University of California Berkeley (use CalVisitor, or public terminals in the libraries for paywall journal access)

• Not all universities: Stanford sucks, poor public access, most library books in offsite storage. Go Bears!

Portland State protects its network from random public abuse (or use) with a sign-in page that only works for Windoze (not even Mac OSX), and a cellphone SMS passcode kludge that works for a long list of international providers (Nepal?) but not Oregon companies like Consumer Cellular. If you have an iPhone or Android, you can use the SMS kludge, but that means you already have a connection.

So - internet login it is. The email can be delivered anywhere, but gmail is easy, you only need to sign in and open the mail and click the link. This is the only thing I use gmail for. Otherwise, I prefer to not share my private email with Google Analytics and the NSA.

I don't know why the main PSU SSID suddenly becomes enabled for the reconnect, instead of staying on PSU Guest, but that is what seems to work. Before fall 2015, you stayed on PSU Guest with no major hassle.

How did I figure this out? The "dhclient -r" was a frob attempted at the Smith Center helpdesk. The rest of it was trial and error.

Mordac is the Preventer of Information Services, a character in the Dilbert comic strip, whose job is to make the computers in Dilbert's workplace inaccessable and impossible to use. There ought to be a mordac.pdx.edu server at PSU, explaining how to accomodate obstructive PSU IT behavior. The best explanation I can come up with is that if PSU students are permitted to use Linux, they will get high paying jobs using Linux in the Portland area, and PSU IT will lose a source of abusable underpaid labor. I assume PSU administration would rather have alumni paying off their student loans, then make charitable donations to PSU, but if the bosses complain too much then PSU IT will cut them off. Don't fuck with Mordac.