WLAN at P2P 2004

Participants of the conference will have the possibility to use the ETH-wide WLAN infrastructure.

General Mechanism

What you need:

WLAN enabled device.
DHCP client
Password and Username from the Registration Desk
SSH client

The process of getting acces works like this:

Connect a WLAN base-station. Network: "Public", no encryption.
Request an IP address and network configuration data via DHCP.
Do an SSH-login to valid.ethz.ch with the password and username you have been given.
That's it.

Remark and Warnings

You get a NAT-ed IP address via DHCP, but there is no firewall!
Your computer needs to be patched with the current security-fixes!
WLAN encryption is off, people can listen to your connections. Use SSH or VPN for remote logins.
WLAN is not a high-performance networking solution. Please do not transfer large amounts of data.
There is no need to configure a proxy for web-browsing.
DNS and network information will be provided by the DHCP server.
ETH will not provide mail-servers. Mail can be sent directly or via your own mail-server.
To use SSH with an username different from your own, you can use either ssh username@valid.ethz.ch or ssh -l username valid.ethz.ch as commandline syntax.

Notes on specific Systems

Linux

Depending on the type of card (mini-PCI, PCMCIA, ...) and software set-up, you need to only plug-in/activate the card to get the WLAN connectivity itself or you may need to do some manual set-up. Again depending on your set-up, you might get a dhcp-address automatically or not. To get a DHCP-address manually, calling "dhclient " is usually enough. Now connect to valid.ethz.ch with the username and password given to you. After the server has accepted your login you have full Internet access.

Windows

Enable the WLAN card (usually enabling the wireless card is enough) and set it to get IP address and other information "automatically". Then do the SSH-login to valid.ethz.ch. A free SSH client for Windows is PuTTY.

MacOS

Enabling the WLAN card should be enough in most cases to get the basic connection. Mac OS X comes with a command-line OpenSSH version. Use the same syntax as for Linux. For Mac OS 9 and before, "nifty telnet ssh" is a free solution available from numerous places.

Other Operating Systems

As long as your device can communicate with the base-stations, can use DHCP and can initiate an SSH connection with password-based authentication, you can use the ETH WLAN.

For questions contact Arno Wagner