Edwin van Nuil

WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1x / EAP-TTLS

Recently I decided to upgrade my wireless network at home. My current setup is a pfsense firewall and a airport extreme accesspoint.

For my new Wireless LAN I decided to implement WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TTLS and a radius backend.

From the wiki entry of EAP-TTLS:

"EAP-TTLS offers very good security. The client does not need be authenticated via a CA-signed PKI certificate to the server, but only the server to the client. This greatly simplifies the setup procedure as a certificate does not need to be installed on every client."

First I describe the installation of the freeRADIUS server and the configuration of the Airport Extreme. Next the client configuration on OS/X Leopard and finally the installation of a EAP client for windows that supports TTLS on Windows XP/Vista.

Using VMWare Server 2.0 Remote Console Add-on on OS/X

VMWare released the 2.0 server edition last month; so I installed it this week on my test server. This server is a Ubuntu 8.04.1 machine. I already had a VMWare server 1.x running and the upgrade went well.

Using Firefox 3.0.1 to admin the server also works very nice and in the same way as our ESX server. If I click on the Console tab under Firefox on Ubuntu it installs a Firefox add-on the first time. After that I have a standalone Remote Console.

But when I connect to the VMWare server from my Mac using Firefox I can use all the functions except the Remote Console Add-on. Firefox tries to install it but fails because the package isn't compatible with OS/X.

In the VMWare forums I read that there are rumors that VMWare is developing a native OS/X client, but in the mean time this is how I connect to the VMWare server from my Macbook Pro:

ssh -X -f -q $SERVERIP /home/nuil/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/plugins/vmware-vmrc -h "127.0.0.1:443"

where $SERVERIP is the IP address of the VMWare server and the xxxxxxxx is the profile id of your local Firefox on the Ubuntu server. On my configuration I use port 443, but on a default installation it is port 8333.

For this to work you must have X11 installed on your Mac.

Paros Web Proxy on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Paros is a proxy program you can use to evaluate the security of web applications. It's free of charge and runs completely in Java. Through Paros's proxy nature, all HTTP and HTTPS data between server and client, including cookies and form fields, can be intercepted and modified.

In this first article I describe how to install Paros in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, in a future article I give a description of installing it in OS/X and a brief description of the workings.