NUS Wireless WPA Supplicant for Linux and Raspberry Pi

It came to my attention, recently, that people were still struggling with wireless configuration on their Linux, or Raspberry Pi, to connect with the NUS wireless network. Linux isn’t that well supported on campus, but there are official guides that are plenty helpful. Further, I’d expect that Linux users can pretty much self-support themselves.

It’s pretty easy. If you use a GUI on a modern Linux distribution, it greatly simplifies the configuration of the WPA supplicant for you. The most important things you need to know:

• Security: WPA2 Enterprise
• Authentication: PEAP
• Inner Authentication: MSCHAPv2
• Username: <domain>\<username>

After playing around with your GUI, and getting your wireless connected, you can take the resulting WPA supplicant configuration to see what’s needed.

Here’s how your WPA supplicant configuration file ought to look like:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
network={
  ssid="NUS"
  key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
  eap=PEAP
  identity="nusstu\a0123456"
  password="mypassword"
  phase2="auth=MSCHAPv2"
}

The file goes into /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

This is, incidentally, taken from one of my Raspberry Pis, which are live on NUS wireless network.

That’s all there is to it. Simple enough?