Eduroam Workaround for College Student

Hello all!

I used OpenWrt at home before and am now living away at college. I wanted to use a Chromecast on the college internet Eduroam, but of course it is not able to connect to enterprise WPA. Thus, I was thinking about creating a routed client for just the Chromecast to live on in my room.

Here's the dilemma and things I have thought about:

  • The university recently just stopped allowing ethernet ports to be activated, so anything I do would have to be masqueraded and use a wireless connection as my WAN.
  • Servicenet allows me to register MAC addresses and connect them to it and use them. It filters out streaming devices like Chromecasts, so it wouldn't work anyways.

However, if I were to use a RPi 4b, I can add that to the MAC address filter and use Servicenet which is has no WPA authentication in general. I'd then probably just buy a USB WiFi dongle so I can output the network I could then connect to, using onboard RPi WiFi as WAN
Would this be a viable alternative, or should I consider buying a router?

If I were to buy a router for the room, which should I buy in order to still use a routed client connection where I cannot use any ethernet at all. This is the most important part is that I cannot use any ethernet.

Routed client is rather unlikely to be an option, as I don't see IT adding a static route for you - meaning you'd end up with masquerading anyways.

Don't buy a RPi for its wireless capabilities (neither onboard, nor USB), more traditional wireless routers are much stronger in this regard (and cheaper), especially the tri-radio options might come in handy (e.g. map-ac2200).

2 Likes

Just a clarification, you still think it would be possible to have this setup in general if I had no static route and had masquerading?

Do you think tri-radio is the way to go in this case then? Know any semi-cheap options? The ones I was thinking of that I could get semi-used and for cheaper would all be Broadcom chips so other suggestions would be appreciated!

Linksys MR8300 / EA8300
NETGEAR RBS50 / RBR50
NETGEAR SRS60 / SRR60
Asus Lyra MAP-AC2200, as already mentioned by @slh

While you can surely find a technical solution to work around this, please make sure that you're still complying with the terms of service of your university. There is probably a good reason for filtering streaming devices.

2 Likes

(I'm sure it is - on a worldwide network that's accessible at most major universities.)

Yup, but some rules seem to be local: At one location they're blocking all connections to SMTP servers, at another they don't.