OVERVIEW

Target audience: McGill students, faculty and staff, researchers

When you boot a Raspberry PI and click on the WiFi logo to connect to the McGill network, you will see that wpa.mcgill.ca is greyed out.

Follow the steps below to connect to the McGill WiFi. To run these commands, open a terminal window.

Instructions for Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm or newer:

1. Validate that you can see the wpa.mcgill.ca network by running this command. You should see wpa.mcgill.ca as an available network.
   
   sudo nmcli dev wifi
   
   
2. Add the connection with nmcli being sure to replace the username and password with your credentials.
   
   sudo nmcli connection add \
type wifi \
connection.id wpa.mcgill.ca \
wifi.ssid wpa.mcgill.ca \
wifi.mode infrastructure \
wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-eap \
802-1x.eap peap \
802-1x.identity firstname.lastname@mail.mcgill.ca \
802-1x.phase2-auth mschapv2 \
802-1x.password <mcgill password>
   
   
3. Now that the configuration is added, run this command to connect to wpa.mcgill.ca:
   
   sudo nmcli dev wifi connect wpa.mcgill.ca
   
   
4. Validate that you are connected to wpa.mcgill.ca by running:
   
   sudo nmcli connection show --active
   
   
5. If you are connected to wpa.mcgill.ca the following information will be displayed and highlighted:
   root@raspberry:~ # sudo nmcli connection show --active
   
   NAME              UUID                                                       TYPE          DEVICE
   wpa.mcgill.ca  8cd3526a-17c7-4794-9dd0-d1241a99bd08  wifi           wlan0
   lo                   405e39ff-ad32-4428-bb3a-dfbe907c424d  loopback     lo
   
   
6. To set wpa.mcgill.ca as your default Wifi network, run this command:
   
   sudo nmcli connection modify wpa.mcgill.ca connection.autoconnect-priority 100

Instructions for Raspberry Pi OS Older than Bookworm (e.g., Bullseye, Buster, and Stretch):

1. To generate a password hash, run the following command and substitute your password:
   
   echo -n plaintext_password_here | iconv -t utf16le | openssl md4
(stdin)= 6602f435f01b9173889a8d3b9bdcfd0b
   
   
2. Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. You will have to manually add the WiFi credentials to this file by adding the following:
   Replace identity and password after the hash with your credentials:
   
   network={
         ssid="wpa.mcgill.ca"
         scan_ssid=1
         key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
         pairwise=CCMP
         group=CCMP
         eap=PEAP
         identity=firstname.lastname@mail.mcgill.ca
         password=hash:6602f435f01b9173889a8d3b9bdcfd0b
         phase1="peaplabel=0"
         phase2="MSCHAPV2"
         id_str="mcgill"
}
   
   
3. Protect the file so only the root has access:

   chmod 600 /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
chown root:root /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

4. Edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf. Add the following three lines to the end of the file:

   cat << EOF >> /etc/dhcpcd.conf
interface wlan0
env ifwireless = 1
env wpa_supplicant_driver = wext , nl80211
EOF

5. Edit /lib/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks/10-wpa_supplicant. You will have to search for the one instance of nl80211,wext and replace it with wext,nl80211.
   
   
6. Reboot the Raspberry PI. It should connect to WiFi after a little while.

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