MacResearch

The university that I work for, like many out there, use some pretty stringent wifi security, and until today, I wasn’t able to join the network with my iPod touch. That was until I learned about the iPhone Configuration Utility. This free application can be downloaded from Apple, and is actually intended for use by system administrators in enterprises that are deploying iPhones to their employees, but it also comes in handy for configuring advanced features of your iPhone that are not accessible via the standard UI.

Every wifi network is different, but I’ll quickly walk through the steps I took to get online at my university. If you adapt the instructions for your own network setup, hopefully you too will be online in a jiffy.

First, download and install the iPhone Configuration Utility. Launch it, and click on the ‘Configurations’ entry in the source list on the left. Click on the New toolbar item to create a new profile. In the General tab, give it a name, and a unique identifier. For the identifier, you usually use a reversed domain, such as edu.myuni.chemistry.profile, but as long as it is unique, it should work.

Now choose the Wi-Fi tab in the pane on the right. Here you can enter the details of the network you are using, which you can probably find on your University web site. Setting the configuration is quite similar to configuring the wifi of a laptop, so if you got your MacBook online, you should be able to setup the iPhone.

A few things you should pay particular attention to:

• Make sure you enter the name of the network (SSID) exactly, otherwise your iPhone will not couple the configuration to your wifi network later on.
• In addition to the security type, make sure you set the protocols and authentication details, and — if needed — install any certificates. These options are available via the tabs at the bottom of the Wi-Fi pane.

When you are finished configuring the wifi settings, save the profile, and then click the Export button in the toolbar. Give the profile a name, and save it to your hard disk.

I couldn’t find a way to transfer the profile file to my iPod touch via USB; it seems as though you have to email it to yourself. This should not be a problem for iPhone owners, because they can retrieve email via the cellular network, but when you have an iPod, it presents a chicken-and-egg problem: You need wifi to retrieve your email, and you can’t connect to wifi without the email. I’m afraid you are on your own here. You will need to find some other way to briefly connect to the internet and collect your email. You could use your home network, or briefly share the airport port on your MacBook, for example.

When you have downloaded the email to your iPhone/iPod touch, click the file, and follow the instructions to install the configuration. Usually, you will have to enter the network password at this point.

To finish off, go into Settings, and try to connect to the university network. If all goes well, the profile will be loaded, and you will be online.

If you ever need to connect another user to the same network, you don’t have to go to all the trouble of using the iPhone Configuration Utility again; the profile file is an easy-to-follow XML file, and you can usually just change the user name entry and reuse it.

You would think in this day and age that setting up a wifi network would be more plug-and-play, but at least with the iPhone Configuration Utility, it is now a possibility.