Click anywhere to close box

eduroam Hot News - January 2012

Three more organisations are now offering operational services - Bath Spa University, Dumfries and Galloway College and Glasgow Caledonian University provide Home and Visited services, bringing the total of operational participants in the UK to 117.

'FreeRADIUS Demystified' Seminar pre-Networkshop - we will be kicking off Networkshop 40 with a seminar on Tuesday morning 'FreeRADIUS Demystified'. This will comprise an introduction to FreeRADIUS, the basics, logic flow, best practice using virtual servers, logging, using unlang for filtering and realm checking, forward look at FR3 followed by a series of 4 - 5 ten minute 'rapid-fire' slots presented by members of the community.

If you would like to participate in the rapid-fire section of the seminar and share any FR tricks and techniques you have used in your own FR implementation we'd like to hear from you. Please e-mail the eduroam service manager

January Joiners: the New Year has seen a flurry of joining activity - London South Bank, Bournemouth University, Lewisham College, Kirklees College and University Campus Suffolk have all registered to provide eduroam. We look forward to helping them with their deployments over the coming months.

The number of organisations participating in eduroam has also been swelled by the separate registration of the institutions that comprise the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. East Malling Research, John Innes Centre, Institute for Animal Health, Babraham Institute and Rothamsted Research are now listed individually.

December News

NRPS Upgraded - the National RADIUS Proxy Servers have been updated to Radiator 4.9. Following the initial upgrade of roaming2, the upgrade of roaming 1 and 0 followed sequentially. The whole process was achieved seamlessly on 30th November.

New Joiners, December - Glyndwr University is the latest organisation to register. This is excellent news, however a number of organisations that have been registered for some time have decided to defer work on implementing eduroam. Although Janet offers e-mail support, online documentation and consultancy services it is understandable that some organisations cannot justify the resources for depolyment of 802.1X and eduroam. As a result of this the headline total membership figure has reduced slightly. The good news is that the number of operational sites is increasing. eduroam is now operational at 112 organisations in the UK.

Broadening of availability of eduroam - Kent PSN Schools Broadband Network achieved Home service operational status on 8th December (for staff only). The aim is for a Visited service to follow shortly. This marks an interesting widening of the community participating in eduroam in the UK. Although it has been possible for some time to find eduroam at certain libraries and teaching hospitals as the result of local university-health authority/local authority associations, this is the first time that eduroam will be enabled at sites connected by a local authority network. (The KPSN is of course connected to JANET). This is fully in accord with developments in Europe where, in a number of countries, there has been broader availability of eduroam for some time - at libraries, hospitals and other publicly funded organisations.

November News

New Joiners, November - University of Stirling, Carangie College and the Oxfordshire Community Network joined during November.

Operational Services - after benefiting from eduroam Consultancy services recently, Brighton University is now offering an extensive Home and Visited service at a large number of sites across the city.

October News

New Joiners, Sept and October - South Essex College, London Business School, Aerohive Networks, Royal College of Art, University of Chester and Rose Bruford College joined us during September. In October the we were pleased to welcome; Bath Spa University, City College Norwich, Durham University, Kent PSN Schools Broadband Network (for staff and visitors only) and the Institute of Cancer Research. This brings the total number of registered organisations to 159. We look forward to our new joiners providing eduroam services in due course.

New Versions of FreeRADIUS and Radiator released - co-incidentally FreeRADIUS 2.1.12 and Raditor 4.9 were both released on 30th Sept. These releases provide several new features and a number of bug fixes. For more details see: http://freeradius.org/press/index.html and www.open.com.au/radiator/history.html

Previously published eduroam news (follow this link to the archive)

Click anywhere to close box

Click anywhere to close box

Key Facts about eduroam

• The eduroam service provided by JANET in the UK is a federated service that enables JANET connected organisations to offer high quality secure network services for visitors from other eduroam-enabled organisations - without the need for guest account management, saving IT Support workload. There are now 163 registered UK organisations. (Where you can use eduroam).)

• Authenticated logon services can be provided over Wi-Fi, wired connection and from designated guest workstations - giving full access over JANET to other JANET-connected organisations and the Internet.

• Access to the national eduroam infrastructure and the JANET eduroam support service is free of charge allowing the service to be offered to guests free of charge. Participating organisations must implement RADIUS but in many cases organisations which already have 802.1X infrastructure can provide a service at nil additional expense, otherwise the only cost is for a RADIUS server and integration.

• Users log on at ANY full-service eduroam network using own username and password, the same as on their home network, for all sites they visit – without having to refer to the IT department of the visited site.

• Organistations may offer eduroam as a 'Home' and/or 'Visited' service. With a Home service, users can gain authentication at other eduroam sites they might visit (ie the Home site acts as an identity provider). Visited service sites provide an eduroam guest network that supports users visiting from organisations that provide a Home service. The idea of such a flexible approach is to be as inclusive as possible and to allow organisations to implement the type of service that suits their policies and local infrastructure/technical expertise.

• All eduroam-connected users (visitors or local users) experience securely authenticated straightforward access to full JANET network services - giving access to the Internet, home organisation networks via VPN, web mail etc., and permitted resources on the local eduroam network.

• The JANET service forms part of the eduroam federation which includes participants in many other countries – extending usability of the service throughout Europe(zoomable map) and around the world.

Why implement eduroam - is it for my organisation?

Click anywhere to close box