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[Stefan Winter <stefan.winter AT restena.lu>]

Hello!

General consideration not related to the particular situation of Stephane.

"one single user-visible name that merges all the custom SSIDs into one"

what about organizations that cannot afford/manage a user profile based network segmentation and so they use different SSIDs to access different "parts" of the local network inhibiting access of certain users to certain SSIDs? How can a user select the right SSID if they are all under Establisshment Custom Network?

All of what I wrote refered to the installation process: the welcome dialogs and installation progress log refer to the one entry "Establishment Custom Network". Also, all the SSIDs are in one profile ("XML file").

But that has no bearing on the selection of SSIDs in the menu bar: there, networks are listed by their SSID and the user can still click on the SSID they are told to click on.

(an exception are Passpoint networks, where the SSID is not displayed at all, but instead a string taken from inside the configuration profile, which may or may not be identical to the profile name. E.g. eduroam Passpoint profiles display "eduroam via partner" (suffixed by Windows 10 with "Hotspot 2.0" and by Windows 11 with "Passpoint"). This has much more potential for confusion, but it is not the case you are talking about :-) )

Greetings,

Stefan

On 05/09/22 10:59, "Stefan Winter via RT" (via cat-users Mailing List) wrote:

Hello,

3. One extra container for all possible local additions. Observe that you are able to add multiple SSIDs of your own. The will all go into a single profile, so using the SSID as the name of this profile did not seem appropriate. If this approach causes confusion then perhaps we should consider a better approach.

Yes it's a little bit confusing for our users (and for us too !), as during installation, they do not see our private SSID Personnels Univ-Lorraine, but Establisshment Custom Network, which is the primary SSID for our University. Many users (even some IT staffs) stops here and contact us to ask "Hey where is the Personnels Univ-Lorraine SSID ?". We must inform all of our users, but yes, at the end it works well.

However i think profiles should have for name the same as the SSID, why did you changed this ?

There are two logical steps leading to that change.

The first one is that realised that any custom SSID (or wired, or Passpoint RCOI...) added by the IdP admin has "nothing to do with eduroam". For example, your SSID Personnels Univ-Lorraine is certainly not an SSID you expect any roaming traffic on as nobody non-local has configured this SSID at all. Also, whoever is using this SSID is not an eduroam user, and the usage is not subject to eduroam policies - it is entirely your own local SSID, and you do what you like on it, to your own local terms and conditions, open ports, etc.

Since it is unrelated, it would feel very wrong to include it in the eduroam installer under the normal eduroam branding. But we are still fine including such custom networks per se, given that they are (obviously) using the same credentials as the main eduroam configuration does.  This argument was what led us to split out any extra media which is added by the admin under a name that is not related to eduroam, but still include it in the installer as we always did - and what we came up with was this "Establishment Custom Network". If that name is not the best of choices, it can of course be changed. Maybe replace the static "Establishment" with "<IdP name>" and make Custom Network translatable are obvious cosmetic changes we could do. As for "name it like the SSID" - see step 2 below.

Step 2: on Windows, we have the possibility to group multiple network definitions into a single profile, enabling us to move away from profilename == SSID name to something semantically more rich (while your "Personnels Uni-Lorraine" is a quite telling SSID and could stand on its own, many other SSIDs are not and look rather cryptic"). And there could be more than one custom SSID as well. So, one single user-visible name that merges all the custom SSIDs into one, and giving that one profile a nicely readable name, sounded like a good thing to do.

(Sadly, the Windows netsh configuration still has a barrier between SSIDs and RCOIs so that "eduroam" and "eduroam via Partner" ended up being two distinct profiles, even if the eduroam-RCOI could also sail under the same flag in plain "eduroam" semantically)

I hope this explains the situation a bit.

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

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This email may contain information for limited distribution only, please treat accordingly.

Fondation Restena, Stefan WINTER
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L-4365 Esch-sur-Alzette