Portland State has two ways of authenticating users of its 802.11 network. One is NoCat, about which the less said the better. The other is a somewhat idiosyncratic WPA setup. Jules Kongslie and I got a client working with it recently; here's how.
I'm using Debian testing/unstable on an IBM T41 (IPW2100) laptop. I don't use any fancy network manager, just /etc/network/interfaces. My interfaces file uses interface schemas that can be set manually (outside the scope of this HOWTO); thus there are "mapping" lines in it. The relevant lines of my interfaces file are
iface ipw0-pdxnet inet dhcp wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/pdx.conf
The key, then, is the pdx.conf file. Mine looks like this:
network={
ssid="pdx.edu"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
eap=TTLS
identity="masseyb"
password="ntmypsswrd"
auth_alg=OPEN
anonymous_identity=""
scan_ssid=1
phase2="auth=PAP"
}
It would be nice to not have to give one's password in cleartext, but I can't figure a workaround. Make sure to keep this file 0600 or better.
The right way would be for PSU to replace the PAP auth with CHAP, or better yet to go to Radius, which I think they plan to do RSN. This would also make Linux Network Manager work, which would for example let me use the network reasonably from my Nokia 770.
At any rate, when I invoke ifup ipw0 on my laptop the laptop will run DHCP to get an IP, then run
wpa_supplicant \ -i ipw0 \ -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/pdx.conf \ -D wext
(plus some other stuff). It takes a while in this setup to get a connection; be patient. Note that the generic wext driver is used; the ipw drivers should only be used with old kernels.
Hope this helps. Comments welcome. (B)