Carl Hage

UTS Wireless

That’s right, my university’s wireless network has no support for linux (or so they say). This basically took me a few days to get around and I came very close to giving up altogether and going back to the horrible XP, however I prevailed and am a happy fedora user.

The first thing you will notice is that you can connect to the UTS WIRELESS connection that shows up when your on campus, then whenever you browse to a website you will be redirected to something like: https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and will be asked for a login (UTS student ID and password).

The next page will say “Loading Network Connect…” this will take forever and finally your Firefox will crash.

The problem it turns out is the fact that Fedora uses an open source implementation of Java called OpenJDK, this unfortunately does not work as well as the real J2RE and will crash a lot.

You can test the java version your browser is using by going to http://javatester.org/version.html

You will need to go to http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp and download the latest version (at the time of writing this, it is update 12).

Download the .rpm.bin version and extract the rpm by doing:

sh jre-6u12-linux-i586-rpm.bin

This will extract the rpm, now install it

rpm -Uvh jre-6u12-linux-i586.rpm

So the latest real (Sun) Java is installed, but you need to tell the system about it:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java 1612

And now you need to select it as the default java to be used:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java

There are 2 programs which provide ‘java’.

Selection           Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                        /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/bin/java

2                            /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

Once you have done this the last step is to get Mozilla to use the real Java plugin and not the horrible IcedTea implementation

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 1612

This will install the real Java browser plugin, and to active it:

alternatives –config libjavaplugin.so

There are 2 programs which provide ‘libjavaplugin.so’.

Selection             Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                         /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/lib/i386/IcedTeaPlugin.so

2                             /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

So enter 2 to change to use the real java plugin.

Now that everything is set up correctly. You need to start Firefox in safemode, to do this either create a shortcut for this or launch from Terminal:

firefox %u -safe-mode

Then go to https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and login with student ID and password.

Once you have done this you will see the Network Connect working properly, however it runs for a split second and then quits. We’re almost there! Now if you look in your home directory /home/username/ you will notice subdirectories called .juniper_networks/network_connect/, now what you need to do is

cd ~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/

There should be a number of files in there

The ones you will need to get this working are ncdiag and installNC.sh

./ncdiag

will run a diagnostics test for your Network Connect installation, now I saw that it did not install properly.

What you need to do is

chmod +x installNC.sh

./installNC.sh

This will actually install the Network Connect software, then run firefox in safe mode again, login and it should pop up with the Network Connect window and your on your way, happy surfing!