Airport under MacOS X 10.5

With the new version of MacOS X Apple has also completely revised the network settings. The most obvious alterations are on the one hand the integration of the network settings and the internet connection program. The setting options for secure wireless networks, on the other hand, have been extended considerably.

As a result, the setting up of the WLANs at the university follows a different procedure than at MacOS X 10.4.

WLAN in three steps

1. If Airport is started, the wireless net "uni-ms" should be recognized automatically and offered in a menu list. User ID and password for network access must be entered into the relevant fields. The menu for authentication by 802.1X should remain on "Automatic".

2. After clicking "Connect..." the authentication dialog for 802.1X will appear, where the same access data as in the previous step must be entered.

3. If the access data are correct and the signal of the WLAN is strong enough, a working connection will be set up within a few seconds. All future connections to the wireless net "uni-ms" will be set up automatically as soon as Airport is within range of the university network.

WLAN in a few more steps

Under certain circumstances problems might arise. This is a subjective selection of the most frequent problems with possible solutions:

10.5 was installed as update to 10.4 and the WLAN settings for "uni-ms", which were working before, do not work at all, work unreliably or are incomprehensible. Airport-Status is "self-allocated IP", although DHCP has been set in "Further options..." under TCP/IP.
In the update, the extended options obviously lead to a vast number of undocumented possible errors, which are very hard to localize in the log files. It takes much less time to delete all entries to „uni-ms“ from the settings for Airport and then adjust them as described above.

I always get error messages that my 802.1X settings are wrong, although user name, password and authentication process are correct.
This error might be caused by the setting of the domain, which should be adjusted for "User" and be deactivated at system or login. Or it is a Heisenbug from the update to 10.5, which occurs despite the correct domain. The latter is also responsible for arbitrarily filled in or blank password dialogs.
Alternatively, you should check whether the settings under Further Options/802.1X are correct. Under the user profile, PEAP must be activated for the authentication. Sometimes this changes to TTLS and TLS as if by magic.

Most of the time I do have net access, but sometimes I get the error message that my access data are incorrect, although it worked seconds before and I did not change my password anywhere. Or the authentication process takes for ever and is interrupted without a comment.
Very likely, signal strength is weak, which happens occasionally.

-- LauraOeste - 2011-05-04