MacBook Pro 10.5.7 802.1X Login Windows

Well, a little ambitious but I thought I'd try and get the MacBook Pro's logining into the 802.1X wireless network at the login window (by the way they are on AD). Oh, and this would be the second time of trying, but I am trying everything I tried back then, just incase a recent update of OS X or the wireless system has any influence.


Alas, a different problem this time. It appears the wireless is actually broken on the MacBook Pro's after many images and re-images. Just re-running an update to see if that fixes the wireless. When I try and connect to the college wireless it comes up with "802.1X Authentication failed" ...... (error 1 on en 1) doh!. It might be because the image might have come from some other hardware (not a MacBook Pro)......Well, happened again. This solution worked:


Delete the system wide network settings:
Go to Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences

• Drag SystemConfigurations to the trash, empty trash, restart.

found it on an apple discussion forum- http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1506347 


Seems to work fine on my iMac though.


Found this interesting page on Apple website:


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3326


Seem to document it quite well, but I definitely tried all of this.


The most promising thing is the "Login Window" Profile. When that is ticked and ChesterfieldCollege is added to prefered networks, at the login screen it says "Network Login Required" or something similar. When you type in a username and password it thinks about it for a while with a spinny thinky thing to the right of the password box. But then shakes! looked at the logs and I did see the mention of "Certificate" failed to authenticate and something about 'not from a trusted authority' or something like that. This is what pointed me to the certificate problem.


Looking into it, when you first add yourself to the wireless you have to accept a certificate. If you look at the certificate before accepting it, it gives you the option to permanently accept it which is what I ticked. Still no luck.


One of my conclusions from before was that it was to do with the certificate. I found a lot of postings refering to a certificate you must get from your 'Administrator'. This must then be added permanently to the list of certificates in Keychain. So I'm probably best off talking to ICT Services.


Of course right now I have to deal with the MacBook Pro wireless error.... well, looks like I fixed that one by deleting Airport adaptor and re-adding it under the name "Airport 2". So I added to the wireless, went into keychain and made the certificates "Always trusted". Tried to login and got this message.


Definitely a certificate problem.


Well, last thing to try was a "System Login". Created one and worked a charm!!! Might create more wifi activity, but hopefully the system can cope with it. A note to make is that we login and use Networked home drives, so as soon as their is a weak signal, it all goes to pot. Oh well.