This article will walk through some troubleshooting steps if you are having issues connecting to the eduroam or USU-guest wireless networks
Table of Contents
Common Symptoms and Resolutions
- Unstable or unreliable eduroam connection
- Forget" or remove the USU-guest network on your device
- Unstable or unreliable wireless connection
- Ensure wireless drivers are up-to-date
- Ensure operating system is up-to-date
- Check for coverage issues (signal strength)
- Some devices only support the 2.4 GHz band and not 5GHz. These devices may experience degraded performance due to the amount of interference on the 2.4 GHz band.
- Cannot see the eduroam or USU-guest wireless networks (SSIDs)
- If the eduroam or USU-guest networks do not appear in the list of available wireless networks, your drivers may need to be updated.
- USU IT does not provide wireless in family housing (Aggie Village, Townhomes, West Stadium Villa). Refer the user to Housing IT for support.
- Can connect to a wireless network, but internet is not connected (may say connected but no internet)
- The DNS cache may contain outdated information and is preventing the computer from accessing the internet. Please see Flush DNS below
Flush DNS on Windows
- Click start, search for cmd, right click and click Run as Administrator
- Type ipconfig /all hit enter
- Type ipconfig /release hit enter
- Type ipconfig /flushdns hit enter
- If the command was successful you will see the message "Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache"
- Type netsh int ip reset hit enter
- Restart the computer
Advanced topics for the USU network
This information is generally only useful for people involved in technical support.
Ethernet Switches and Consumer Routers
Wireless routers are generally not allowed on the USU campus, as they interfere with our wireless system.
Ethernet switches, wired routers, and similar devices are allowed on the USU network, however IT can only provide limited support when these devices are in use. To prevent serious mis-configurations that could impact entire buildings, there is a default limit of 10 client devices on every wall jack on campus.
Switches (including switches built into Shoretel/Mitel phones) and routers can cause some unexpected behaviors:
- Link will stay connected to the wall jack even when a client device is rebooted
- USU switches don't know when a client reboots which will cause them to retain stale registration information about the connected device
- To update this information, the network cable should be disconnected from the USU wall jack (or alternatively wait up to 4 hours for a timeout)
- USU switches don't know when a client reboots which will cause them to retain stale registration information about the connected device
- IT has no visibility behind a router
- These types of devices use NAT to share the network connection -- the network will see all traffic as coming from the router itself
- The IT Networking team cannot support devices behind a router -- you will have to rely on your departmental support or connect the device directly to a wall jack and reproduce your issue
- a problem on any device connected to the router will be reported to the owner of the router, and in extreme cases the router may be disabled by the Networking or Security team
- Wall jacks have a default limit of 10 MAC addresses, after which additional clients will be ignored
- Client devices are forbidden from participating in spanning-tree protocol
- Most managed switches have spanning-tree enabled by default -- it must be disabled on any ports connecting to a USU wall jack
- Any time USU routers and switches see a spanning-tree packet on a client port, it will disable the port for 10 minutes
Wake-on-LAN (WOL)
The USU network uses the "non-routable" VLAN by default ("lab" VLAN for labs) for ports that have not seen a device. When the link goes down on a wall jack, our switch will reset it to this default configuration. When a WoL-capable device goes to sleep or powers off, it changes the link speed to 10Mbps to save power. This causes the link to go down and come back up on the port. If the device is connected directly to a wall jack, the state on the switch port will be reset. In this case, you must send your WoL packets on the default network for the port. If there is another device between the WoL client and the wall jack (a phone or an unmanaged switch, for example), the link will stay up on the wall jack when the link goes down on the client. In this case, the state is not reset on the port connected to the wall jack. In this case, you will generally need to send WoL packets on the network the client device uses, however there are a number of events that could require a WoL packet on the default network for the port (time, device in the middle has rebooted, USU network device has rebooted, etc).
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For further assistance, please contact your Department IT Support or the IT Service Desk