Zit Seng’s Superwall

The last two days I’ve been attending class at the Singapore Management University’s downtown campus. It’s actually my first visit to the SMU campus, so during the breaks I went around exploring the place a little. I always thought it would be nice to be studying in such a central downtown location. All the shopping, movies, and other entertainment just a stone’s throw from studying.

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I’ve been wanting to say this for the longest time. Since receiving this mass email this morning, I thought it might as well be now. SOME NUS STUDENTS ARE REALLY VERY STUPID! Does it make sense to leave a notebook out there in the open, walk away from it, and expect it to stay put exactly where you left it when you return 10 minutes later?

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This week is IT Security Week at NUS, and so they have an IT Security Carnival held at the Forum. They have been running this for some years now, and I must commend the organizers for their excellent work all around. In my opinion, this is one of the more successful and meaningful event, and I’m not saying that just because IT security is one of my pet areas too.

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We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help us run our network and data centre operations. This is like an internship, a program that we’ve run for one semester already. It is a really exciting opportunity for students as they will get hands-on learning experience working with production enterprise networks and data centres.

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This is the start of “Week 1″. It is the second week of school at NUS because the semester started with “Week 0″. Yes, how very much like computer people to start counting from zero. Week 1 is where orientation is over and classes officially start. Week 0 at NUS wasn’t overly crowded. Today, I’m seeing congestion everywhere.

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The new school year at NUS has started. Many people are buying new computers. Some of them will be buying Macs, particularly since they have gotten quite popular in the last few years. Now, how do you get it working in NUS? Most official help resources are going to focus just on Windows XP or Windows Vista. So here you are, my concise guide to getting a couple of basic things setup to work in NUS.

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This is a little collection of information about using Mac computers in NUS (and SoC). The Macs work pretty well here, as long as you know how to get it configured correctly. There are four main configurations covered here:

1. Wireless Network
2. Exchange Email
3. Network Drives
4. Printing

That should be pretty much the main things you’ll need to know.

Wireless Network

There are two main wireless networks in NUS: One that goes by the NUS SSID and the other NUSOPEN SSID. This section is about configuring the wireless network with NUS SSID. This is a secure wireless network were your over-the-air traffic is encrypted. NUSOPEN works like Wireless@SG (login through a web-based captive portal), is insecure and trivial for anyone to sniff your private network traffic. Don’t use NUSOPEN.

1. Start System Preferences.
2. Click on Network (under Internet & Network).
3. On the left panel, click on AirPort.
4. Click on Advanced…
5. Click on the + sign.
6. For the Network Name, enter NUS.
7. For Security, select 802.1X WEP.
8. No need to enter the User Name and Password now. It doesn’t seem to be remembered anyway. Make sure 802.1X is set to Automatic.
9. Click Add.
10. The new NUS configuration will probably be listed at the bottom of the Preferred Networks list. Drag the NUS item to the top of the list.
11. Click OK.
12. Click Apply.
13. Your Mac should now automatically try connecting to the new NUS wireless network. If it does not, choose NUS in the Network Name selection box.
14. The 802.1X Authentication window appears. Enter your NUSNET account details.
15. You’re done. If you want to login automatically to the NUS wireless network, continue: Quit System Preferences completely. Restart it, click on Network, then click on Advanced.
16. Click on the 802.1X tab. On the left, click on User Profiles, then WPA: NUS.
17. For User Name and Password, enter your NUSNET account details.
18. For Authentication, deselect TTLS and EAP-FAST. These are not used in the NUS wireless network.
19. Click OK. Then click Apply. Quit System Preferences.

Ok, you’re done.

If you’ve a N95 or N95 8GB, configuration information is available here. The information will probably be useful for most modern Symbian based phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc). iPhone users can refer to Lester Chan’s guide.

For Linux Users, check SOC NOC and Linux & Open Source @ NUS.

Exchange Email

Here’s how to access your NUSNET Exchange email from Mac OS X’s Mail application.

1. Start the Mail application.
2. Press Command-comma.
3. Press the + sign.
4. Type in your Full Name and Email Address. The Password is not necessary at this point.
5. Click Continue.
6. For Account Type, choose Exchange.
7. For Description, enter NUSNET or anything you like to describe this account.
8. For Incoming Mail Server, enter imap.nus.edu.sg.
9. For User Name and Password, enter your NUSNET account details.
10. For Outlook Web Access Server, enter exchange.nus.edu.sg.
11. Click Continue.
12. For Description, enter NUSNET Outgoing or anything you like.
13. For Outgoing Mail Server, enter smtp.nus.edu.sg.
14. Check the Use Authentication checkbox.
15. For User Name and Password, enter your NUSNET account details.
16. Click Continue.
17. Your Account Summary window should look similar to this. Click Create.

You’re done. The Mail application should now connect to your Exchange account, grab the list of folders, synchronize email, etc.

Network Drives

NUSNET provides one network drive, often referred to as the H: drive in Windows. SoC users also get another network drive from their SoC UNIX account. To access these drives from your Mac:

1. Go to Finder, press Command-K.
2. For the Server Address, enter the following: smb://nts09.comp.nus.edu.sg/com/comlaizs. This is the format for SoC staff users. For students, this is something like smb://fs5.nus.edu.sg/stuhome/u0x/u0×0xxxx.
3. Just click Connect.
4. You will be prompted for authentication. Entier your NUSNET account username and password here.
5. Then click Connect.
6. You’ll see your network drive in Finder.

The Server Address for your NUSNET network drive tend to be varied, depending on whether you are staff or student, staff of which faculty, student undergrad or postgrad, etc. If you have more information to share, I’d be glad to update this page. You can also login to a Windows machine (and into your NUSNET account), and check how the H: drive is mapped using the NET USE command.

The Server Address format for SoC UNIX users take the following format: smb://sunfire.comp.nus.edu.sg/<userid> (for students) and smb://suna.comp.nus.edu.sg/<userid> (for staff).

Printing

Here’s how to configure printing to the printers/print queues in SoC.

1. Start System Preferences.
2. Click on Print & Fax.
3. Click the + sign.
4. If there is no Advanced button in the toolbar, you may have to add it there before continuing. Right-click the toolbar (or Control-Click), then drag and drop the Advanced button to the toolbar.
5. For Type, select Windows.
6. The URL is the complicated bit. Make sure you get this right. The URL has the following format: smb://<nusnetid>:<password>@nusstu/nts27.comp.nus.edu.sg/<printername>
   • where <nusnetid> is your NUSNET account name
   • <password> is your NUSNET account password
   • change nts27 to nts09 for staff users
   • <printername> is the queue name of the printer which you can find listed at SoC Printers or Print Queues.
7. For Name, enter anything you fancy to help you remember what print queue this is.
8. Same for Location, whatever you fancy.
9. For Print Using box, choose either the Generic PostScript Printer driver, or select the specific printer driver for the print queue. You can find the list of printer types at SoC Printers or Print Queues.
10. Click Add.
11. Usually fine to leave the option settings unchanged.
12. Click Continue.

That’s it.

Other Stuffs

Here’s a bunch of other miscellaneous information that you may find useful.

• NUS Dialup (still on dialup?!):
  • 6557-1070 for students
  • 6657-1090 for staff
• SoC Dialup:
  • 1800-7761022 toll-free for both SoC staff and students
• NUS VPN:
  • The older Cisco VPN based on IPSEC protocol is deprecated. Best not to use it.
  • The newer Web VPN: http://webvpn.nus.edu.sg/
• SoC-VPN:
  • Head over to https://noc.comp.nus.edu.sg/vpn for more info.

That’s it.

Today is the start of Week 0 of the new academic year at NUS. Week 0 means that it is still orientation, school has not yet started. Surprisingly, campus was not overflowing with people. In fact, I didn’t even find the canteen unusually crowded. If not for the FOW talk at which I had to say a few things for a few minutes, I might not even have realized that today was any different from last week.

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The N95, N95 8GB and probably other similar Symbian phones work great connecting to the wireless network in NUS. If you want security and avoid the fuss with login through a captive web-portal, configure your device to join the NUS SSID wireless network. It’s more complicated to setup, but you only need to do it once.

1. Go to Menu, Tools, Settings, Connections, Access Points.
2. Click Options, New Access Point.
3. Enter a descriptive name (e.g. “NUS”) for the Connection name.
4. Set Data bearer to “Wireless LAN”.
5. Set the WLAN netw. name to “NUS”.
6. Set Network status to “Public” (already the default).
7. Set WLAN netw. mode to “Infrastructure” (already the default).
8. Change WLAN security mode to “802.1x”.
9. Click on WLAN security settings. You will go to a new page.
10. Set WPA/WPA2 to “EAP” (already the default).
11. Click on EAP plug-in settings. You will go to a new page.
12. Ensure that only EAP-PEAP is selected. Select the EAP types, click on Options, then Enable (for EAP-PEAP) and Disable (all others).
13. Then click on EAP-PEAP. New page again.
14. Personal certificate can be left as Not defined.
15. Authority certificate must be set to Thawte Premium Server.
16. Change User name in use to User defined.
17. Type your NUSNET userid (no need for the domain portion) into the User name field.
18. Change Realm in use to User defined.
19. Leave Realm blank.
20. For the next 3 options, Allow PEAPv0 should be Yes, and No for Allow PEAPv1 and Allow PEAPv2.
21. Press your right arrow (to move to the EAPs tab).
22. Only EAP-MSCHAPv2 should be enabled (check mark beside the EAP type). By default EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA is enabled. Highlight the EAP type, click Options, then click Enable (for EAP-MSCHAPv2) or Disable (all others).
23. Click on the EAP-MSCHAPv2 type. New page again.
24. For User name, enter your NUSNET userid (no domain needed).
25. Change Prompt password to No.
26. Enter your password in the Password field.
27. Click back, enough times to get out of the configuration.

Finally, you should be done with the configuration.

To test, launch your phone’s web browser. When asked to select access point, find the NUS entry in the list and click on it. If you had followed the instructions above to save your password, you should automatically connect to the wireless network now.

Note for iPhone users: The iPhone 2.0 software is supposed to support 802.1x PEAP as well. The information here might be useful to configure the iPhone. But since I don’t have an iPhone or access to one, I’ve not tried/tested.