Unix survival guide

Northeaster University unix survival guide

As you may have noticed Northeaster is a terrible place if you are a little bit unix oriented. All the machine around are M$ based or, if you are "lucky" enough, A$. Let alone any kind of reasonable support for something which resemble a unix system from the information services.

After struggling to pass the first few difficulties I decided to write some notes which I hope will help someone to survive. They will slowly appear.

Wireless

Neu has two different wireless services available to people on campus: a free non-cyphered network (NUwave-guest) end a secure network (NUwave). As you can immagine they do not offer any way to get the right certificate in a sane place. To get connected to the second one you will need: dhcpcd (or any other dhcp client implementation), wpa_supplicant, your e-mail @neu.edu with your password and finally this certificate.
Save the certificate to /etc/ssl/certs and edit wpa_supplicant.conf as follows:

network={
        ssid="NUwave"
        key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
        pairwise=TKIP
        group=TKIP
        eap=PEAP
        proto=WPA
        identity="username"
        password="password"
        ca_cert="/etc/cert/securelogin.arubanetworks.com.cer"
        ca_path="/etc/ssl/certs"
        phase1="peaplabel=0"
        phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
        priority=1
}

everithing should work easily.

Mail

Blackboard is completely bloatware, I will never stop saing this. The web interface for mail is really slow and resource consuming. You can easily use your favourite IMAP-enabled mail client with the following informations (mutt is strongly recomended):

imap spoolfile:	imaps://your-username@neumail04.neu.edu/INBOX 
imap password:	your usual password
smtp server:	myneusmtp.neu.edu:465

remember to use TSL encryption for smtp with your username and password.

New system

They passed to google app, I hope things are going to be better. For the moment being they forgot to enable imap: follow this link and unlock it by yourself https://www.google.com/a/husky.neu.edu/UnlockCaptcha

Myapps

You may access, if you really can not live without doing so, myapps using rdesktop with a command like this:

rdesktop myapps2.nunet.neu.edu -r disk:tmp=path-of-the-dist-to-attach \
	-r printer:name-of-the-printer-to-attach -u username  -p password \
	-K -g 1024x750 -r sound:local

Last modified: Monday, 10-Jan-2011 11:58:46 EST