[hackerspaces] h4x0roam

[Georges Toth]

Hi all,

At a syn2cat hackerspace[0] meeting we were recently discussing changing our 
WiFi password when the idea came up, “Why not use something like they use for 
eduroam at our space?”

For those unfamiliar with eduroam[1] let me quickly introduce it. Eduroam was 
initially created in Europe and is now widely used in many international 
educational institutions, such as universities and research centers, for free 
access to the WiFi network.

Participating institutions have a wireless network called “eduroam” which uses 
a flavor of WPA with 802.1x for authentication. In more detail that means they 
are running a radius server connected to some user database.

The interesting part about this is though that in each country they have top 
level radius servers, which are connected to all institutional radius servers, 
and those top level servers are again connected to other country top level 
radius servers, allowing users from one institution to log in at another 
(participating) institution with their same credentials as they use at their 
home network.

Our first idea was to have accounts for everybody instead of one shared 
password, and those accounts should basically be used from our already 
existing account database, we use for our mediawiki.

But then there is one problem. We also host other non-profit organizations at 
our hackerspace.

Do we deny them WiFi access from now on ?

Of course not !

Do we create wiki accounts for all of them ?

Hmmm not a good idea, and needless.

So we went for a database which includes a column marking who is from which 
organization.

In the past few days I felt the urge to get more into freeradius (the radius 
server we use for this) and how they solved various problems at eduroam, and I 
thought, why should we use a mixed database for every NPO, when we could 
actually include other radius servers for granting access to those 
organizations.

Which inevitably led to a much bigger idea ... why not create a network like 
eduroam, but for hackerspaces and similar places ?

Every hackerspace could have a radius server (either self-managed, or hosted) 
and link them to other radius servers ultimately allowing hackers around the 
world to use their same credentials at any access point connected to this 
radius network !



A network we would like to call "h4x0roam".

We are very curious about what other people think about this idea, and we'd 
love to have as many hackerspaces and similar places as possible join our 
efforts !

Please help us spread the word and get involved if you are interested !

We are blogging about our progress at: http://www.h4x0roam.org/blog/
And we've set up a mailinglist at: h4x0roam at lists.hackerspace.lu


[0]: http://www.hackerspace.lu
[1]: http://www.eduroam.org

-- 
regards,

Georges


--
HaxoGreen 2010 - the Hackers' Summercamp in Luxembourg
July 22nd till July 25th 2010, in Dudelange, Luxembourg
Register Now: http://events.hackerspace.lu/camp/2010/
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