406 Not Acceptable

The University of Birmingham offers three wireless networks to connect to: EDUROAM (where the same settings can be used at different Universities), the Guest network, and UOBWLAN (the University’s own network.) Since official support is limited to just Windows and Mac users, there is no guide on how to connect an S60 based mobile phone such as the Nokia N95 or N82 to any of the networks. UOBWLAN uses an extremely secure setup, which makes configuring external devices (even Windows based Laptops) rather difficult; thus, getting my Nokia N82 to connect to UOBWLAN took a lot of time and effort. As even though I had a good grounding on the settings from using the Linux and Windows instructions, I needed to run a number of configurations before I got it working. Thus if you would like to use this information on your own site, please give this site credit for the information, as this is — at the time of writing — the only site with this information. (Now I know of one more site with the information.)

Sadly I only own one device with a digital camera — my mobile phone, so I cannot offer any images to help set this up on your device. Matthew has kindly let me use the images from his site, I’ve uploaded them on here as his site is hosted by his ISP… and they could get grumpy with bandwidth if I hot link them

The key security features/methods used on UOBWLAN are listed below, obviously if your device does not support all of them you will not be able to connect to the UOBWLAN network. As far as I know all of the Nokia S60 devices with wireless networking support all of these features. Both N95, N95 black, and the N82 are confirmed to work, so I would presume any newer phones by Nokia will support all of these standards and more.

• WPA Enterprise
• PEAP
• Authority certificates
• MSCHAPv2

To set up the connection, it would be best to be in an area where you get signal for the wireless network. Then define the access point and edit the access point using my settings.

On the main page for the connection

Connection name: UOBWLAN

Data bearer: Wireless LAN

WLAN network name: UOBWLAN

Network status: Public

WLAN network mode: Infrastructure

WPA security mode: WPA/WPA2

Homepage: None (Not really important)

Now go to WLAN security settings, this is underneath WPA security mode.

Set this up as follows:

WPA/WPA2: EAP

WPA2 only mode: off

Now go to EAP plug-in settings, this is underneath WPA/WPA2

Make sure there is only a tick next to EAP-PEAP. To enable and disable different EAP choices use Options (most likely your left main button) then choose disable the item will no longer have a tick by its name. Now select EAP-PEAP use Options and choose edit, alternatively your main button (depressing the joystick/d-pad) will do this. You should now be in a screen titled EAP-PEAP Settings. This has two tabs Settings and EAPs, in settings you need to choose:

Personal Certificate: Not defined

Authority certificate: Cybertrust Education… (This is all my phone displays of the name, the full name is probably Cybertrust Educational Certificate, or something to that extent. If you do not have this certificate, you need to follow the Linux instructions to get the certificate in *.per format. You can download the certificate in Windows and right click it and their should be an option to open the cerficate [it might be manage I am running Ubuntu, but I will update this later,] and export it to *.ber and *.per your phone accepts one of these modes.)

User name is use: User defined

User name: Your adf user name goes here, it is usually in the form abc123 where abc are your initials and then three random numbers. It is the same user name you use to log in to my.bham.ac.uk.

Realm in use: User defined

Realm: Adf.bham.ac.uk

Allow PEAPv0: No

Allow PEAPv1: Yes

Allow PEAPv2: No

Now press right on your phones joystick/pad to go to the EAPs tab. Disable all the EAP options apart from EAP-MSCHAPv2 (so that there is only a tick beside EAP-MSCHAPv2.) This is done in exactly the same way as you disabled all the settings bar PEAP earlier. Now click on EAP-MSCHAPv2 to edit the settings for this and use:

User name: Your adf user name, this should be the same as what you entered in the Settings tab. Remember it is what you use to login to my.bham.ac.uk

Prompt password: No

Password: Here enter your adf password, remember it is what you use to login to my.bham.ac.uk.

Now if you exit everything, provided the phone saved the information (double check after leaving,) you should be able to connect to the UOBWLAN network. Sometimes my phones built in browser messes up and can’t connect, I find using Opera Mini solves this and it is better than the built in browser anyway. If you’re having any troubles with this, please use the comments for support.

If you, like me, live in Opal student accommodation or any student accommodation that uses Ask4 broadband, you will notice you can access freeview television through your web browser. This is a very nice addition; however, it seems they do not want us to connect via any other means than through our web-browsers. I personally found this restrictive, but there is a way around this. Using this setup will allow you to stream their IPTV to others (which I would not reccommend as Ask4 would not be happy,) or download the live TV broadcast to your computer. Effectively like setting up your own Tivo! Finally, you will be able to mess around with the settings of your media player to get better image quality, this is highly beneficial when watching sport as the IPTV stream is poor for fast moving images. I find watching Match of the Day to be rather difficult using their setup.

First you can try the ‘easy method’ I am not sure if it will work for everyone, or even anyone. It could just be down to the server cache that I am able to go this page that I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Click that link please, and try it out. If you have gone to the normal page you need to use the second method, described below, otherwise you can skip the next paragraph.

Otherwise you need to install the User Agent Switcher for Firefox. Go to the portal page (where there is a link to the TV page.) Now set the Firefox plugin to use the option ‘Opera 9.2 Windows Vista.’ This will fool the server into thinking you are using an unsupported browser, so you will get access to what I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Try going to the TV page and you should go to a page link that in the picture below:

You should now be at this page:

When you select a channel from the dropdown menu and select ‘Play’ the port will change, this is effectively sending a steam to your computer on the network. All you need to do now is set up a media player to do so. It is easiest to do so with VLC, which also provides methods for saving the stream; however, I have successfully watch TV using Totem and I would presume Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Media Player Classic would be able to do the same. You do need to keep this window open for the stream to be sent, that is the only drawback I know of so far; however, this will let you use all the fancy image and aspect ratio enhancements your player has. If you were to use Media Player Classic and FFDShow you could get a really good picture with this method.

 Here is how I set up VLC, you should use similar methods with all the players. Not all media players can handle streaming video of this type, I couldn’t set up MPlayer or Xine, but that might be my own inexperience with those players.VLC is just good as it is easy to save a stream to disk, which means you can record those programs you wanted to watch whilst revising…

I hope you found this tutorial useful, thats 406NotAcceptable 1 – 0 Ask4Broadband.

My lovely host Dreamhost (use promotional code 2DOMAINS4LIFE if you’re interested, you’ll get 2 free domains forever!) happily added and turned on the wp-cache plug-in on my Wordpress install. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is rather handy as I notice the site zips along remarkably fast; however, it makes it very annoying to update the layout of the site.

When I try to add something to the site – for example change the rss link to use my feedburner link – the change won’t occur for another 5 or 6 minutes as I have to wait for the cache to expire. This can make updating my site very, very slow…

Anyway, I need to get back to setting up promotional stuff for this site before going to the cinema. I’ll be going to see Untraceable, which looks rather good. So if it turns out to be a load of crud, expect a post in a few hours!

If you ever want to know who the worst ISP in the UK is, then your answer is Tiscali. Just take a look at some of their reviews. Ok, I might have been exaggerating, but the fact is they are one of the worst ISPs in Britain — and I am so glad to leave them!

According to this story on DailyTech the latest release of the Firefox browser, Firefox 2.0, has reached a new record amount of downloads in the browsers history.

I am glad to see the alternative browser is still making gains upon Internet Explorer’s dominance of the market. Hopefully, if Firefox and other alternatives, such as Opera, keep on making gains then the internet should be a safer place for all.