NUwave-Linux

A dirty script for automating the painful parts of connecting to Northeastern's NUwave wireless network on Linux systems.

This should work on most systems which use NetworkManager to manage wireless networks. It is intended to work with Python 2, so if you're using Arch linux or another distribution which renamed the Python 2 binary to python2, please alter the shebang at the beginning of this script appropriately.

NetworkManager Configuration

Before executing this script, ensure that you have configured NUwave in NetworkManger up to the point where it is capable of establishing a connection to NUwave. To do this, ensure these settings are correct:

• Wireless Security: "WPA & WPA2 Enterprise"
• Authentication: "Protected EAP (PEAP)"
• PEAP version: "Automatic"
• CA Certificate: None
• Inner Authentication: "MSCHAPv2"
• Username: Your husky username without @husky.neu.edu
• Password: Your husky password

After doing this, verify that /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/NUwave looks something like this:

[ipv6]
method=auto
ip6-privacy=2

[connection]
id=NUwave
uuid=<system specific>
type=802-11-wireless

[802-11-wireless-security]
key-mgmt=wpa-eap

[802-11-wireless]
ssid=NUwave
mode=infrastructure
mac-address=<system specific>
security=802-11-wireless-security

[802-1x]
eap=peap;
identity=<your husky id>
phase2-auth=mschapv2
password-flags=1

[ipv4]
method=auto

What this script does

1. Temporarily disables Network Manager Why: The script performs a lot of operations which NetworkManager interferes with. Additionally, it needs to be restarted after altering its configuration file anyway.
2. Unloads the iwlwifi kernel module and reloads it with 11n_disable=1 Why: For most people, NUwave does not work reliably with wireless N in linux.
3. Scans for all nearby access points and hard codes the BSSID of the access point with the best signal quality. Why: Hopping between access points results in disconnects for many people.
4. Re-enables NetworkManager

Note: This script doesn't actually connect to NUwave, it just configures the system correctly so you may still need to click NUwave in the network list after this script is complete.

How to run

This script must be run as root. To setup NUwave, use:

sudo ./nuwave.py nuwave

To simply list nearby wireless networks and access points:

sudo ./nuwave.py list