Connecting iOS to eduroam

eduroam (EDUcation ROAMing) is a global initiative, forming an agreement between educational and research institutions to share wireless access enabling inter-institutional roaming.

Having been offsite this week, but located at one of the teaching hospitals, I found myself needing to access eduroam from my iPhone and iPad. This shouldn’t be too hard, the iPhone is one of the standard/supported University phones so this should be well documented – as it turns out this is *not* the case.

The ITS – The University of Melbourne pages do not give details for configuring iOS devices for using eduroam and the ‘just the settings’ does not produce a connection that will allow you to access the network.

Initial connection

* Go to Settings
* Choose Wi-fi > Wi-Fi switch On
* Choose a network: eduroam

* Enter your username@unimelb.edu.au
* Enter your password

When you select the eduroam network you will be asked to authenticate, you authenticate using your home University credentials; in this case username@unimelb.edu.au and your central/email password.

* Review & Accept certificate

You may see an eduroam.unimelb.edu.au certificate that requests to be verified, try as hard as you can this cannot be authorised at this step in the connection and the connection will fail producing an “Unable to join the network” error message.

What are we missing?

eduroam mobile config file for iOS mobile devices
Users connecting iOS mobile devices to eduroam for the first time will need to install and run an eduroam mobile config file (via UTS).
Please note: users will need to accept a security certificate during the initial connection process.

Having accepted and installed the eduroam mobile config file, everything then proceeds as expected and we can connect to the wireless network.

To access sites external to the unimelb.edu.au domain, the proxy configuration will need to be set for the eduroam network. Use the ‘auto’ setting and http://www.unimelb.edu.au/cgi-bin/proxy.pac