Wireless in CERN Building 1 Room R019 (Glasgow ATLAS Office)

Connecting to the wireless network

First register your wireless cards MAC Address as described below. This only needs to be once.

Windows

There should be an option to scan the local area for networks. The wireless network you should connect to is entitled 'glawap01', it should appear as an unsecured network.

Linux

• Access Point Name: glawap01
• Spanning Tree Protocol: Disable
• Wireless Network Name (SSID): glawap01

It is set to broadcast the SSID such that a linux client will automatically pick it up following /sbin/ifup eth1

LINUX wireless settings are availale via: /sbin/iwconfig

Register MAC Address

The network switch is protected. The MAC address of your wireless card must be registered before you can access the network through it. The first step of the process is determining what the MAC address of your wireless card is. A MAC address is typically 12 characters long and separated into pairs by hyphens e.g: 00-12-CB-7C-C7-81. You will have a MAC address for both your wireless card and the ethernet card in your laptop.

To find both addresses from LINUX simply connect your wireless card and from a terminal issue:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep HW
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 | grep HW

From WINDOWS you will need to open a command prompt via:

Start->Run->cmd
ipconfig /all

This gives rather a lot of information but the two MAC addresses you require should be found (often after the title 'Physical Address').

Having found out the MAC address for your wireless and wired card you now need to enter them into the switch. The same procedure described below can be applied in the case that the router needs to be modified, for change of passwords etc.

The switch has a nice web browser interface which may be found at http://192.168.0.227. However unlike some switches this cannot be accessed through the wireless connection itself and a hard (ethernet) link is required between your computer and the switch (there is a port at the back of the switch). Furthermore you have to configure your web settings before you can talk to the switch. This rather annoyingly requires you to set up a static IP address and a subnet mask (which may be done through your TCP/IP settings).

Static IP: 192.168.0.210
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0 

Once this is done you can access the web based interface through your browser at http://192.168.0.227 .You will be prompted for a username and password to get into the switch. The username and password are written on a piece of paper attached to the switch.

Once in the switch's setings page you are free to add your MAC addresses to the list already present. You are also able to modify other settings of the switch but please leave these alone unless you know what you're doing.

The switch itself is identified on the CERN network (in the same was as laptops have to be registered).

Disclaimer/Any Advice Welcome

As physical access is required to the wireless switch in order to configure it, and it is based in CERN, normal levels of network support for the system are not possible. Any advice on improvements to the system are welcome, however this may take considerable time to implement as it must wait for someone of sufficient expertise (and with free time) to be at CERN.

-- AndrewPickford - 09 Mar 2009