Eduroam Support Clinics What are they?

Eduroam Support Clinics What are they? Moderator: Welcome to the Jisc podcast. Eduroam allows users to seaming less and automatically connect to the internet through a single Wi Fi profile in participating organisations. In this podcast, Jisc s Tara Wilkins talks to Loughborough s University Senior IT Services Specialist Alan Buxey about our free Eduroam clinics. Alan explains how they can help anyone who is considering applying to join Eduroam, is in the process of deploying it or already has an operational Eduroam service. Good morning. My name is Tara Wilkins. I am the Marketing Executive supporting Eduroam. Alan Buxey, Senior IT Services Specialist at Loughborough University facilitates the Eduroam live clinics. Alan is an experienced trainer who delivers a number of our network and technology training courses. He has considerable knowledge of Eduroam through his role as an Eduroam technical specialist. The Eduroam live clinics were developed to give organisations an opportunity to ask questions, share experiences and provide feedback on problematic areas in an informal environment. It s ideal for Universities or Colleges deploying Eduroam or considering deploying Eduroam. Hello Alan. Thanks for your time today. Could you set the scene for listeners and explain how the Eduroam clinic came about? Yes certainly. We ve been the running the Eduroam UK technical and development support side of the Eduroam UK service for many years now and a few years ago we were starting discussions about how we can improve the service in relation to the customers of the service and get more feedback and understand what issues people are having and one thing that came to light was whenever we re at a particular event during the year, such as Net Workshop or Jisc Digifest or any of the Eduroam training courses, I get people coming to me saying oh Alan, hi it s great to meet you and we ve got this problem. We ve had this problem for a few months now, etc and at that point in my mind I m thinking well why haven t you come to us earlier. We often can get the stuff sorted out while they re having the conversation but it would be so much better if they d raised a ticket for example. 1

So we looked at the issue of people raising tickets and going through the formal process and while that service is there, so anyone who has an issue can just contact service@ja.net, put in their support request and we can deal with it, however some people just want more of an informal piece of advice, etc and we thought well why don t we set up a more informal environment in which people can come along. So the idea was then muted so really go informal, treat it more like one of those coffee morning breaks you may have within your workplace where you can just sit round the table with your coffee, saying issues that you ve had or things that you re looking at and ideas that you re having or things you might face or plans that you ve got to act as a sound boarding with work colleagues and so the idea was muted and to enable it to work in a nice environment, one of the tools that we have access to is Adobe Connect. Adobe Connect allows is to have various functions within the web sessions so rather than just a standard Skype or Google Hangouts which can be very informal as a group setting, Adobe Connect gives the possibilities to have breakout rooms so if someone comes into the session and they have a particular issue with a local thing that they don t want to, everyone else to know for example, we can bring them into a breakout session and in that breakout session one of us can act as an advisor or a soundboard and deal with their issues or look at the support server details, go through the current logs with them, etc. So we decided we d go that way and that means running it as a more formal process where you sign up to join the clinic but the actual clinic itself is a rather informal, adhoc system where people can turn up to hear what s going on or get some advice or say what issues they ve been having and see if anyone else has solved that issue, etc, etc. So it s more like a web, a forum video conferencing system that acts more like an on going mailing list. So is the content of each clinic driven by the users? Yes that s right. We may have some things that we want to notify the community about so we have our normal official channels. We have the mailing list. We have the community site. We have the Eduroam UK support portal to put information on. We have the events; we don t want to detract from the events where people can get a more formal presentation such as at Net Workshop, etc however these Eduroam clinics are designed such that the customers in Eduroam can come along, as I said more like an informal coffee morning and have a chat and if there s people turning up and they ve got nothing to talk about, then there s nothing to discuss really if we ve got nothing that we wanna mention. So it is all driven by the customers. We are planning to have certain other events to get the messages out quicker than waiting until the next Net Workshop for example. We ve got some events we re planning to have within these Eduroam clinics and because the sessions are recorded, etc, we ll have the availability of those sessions to be available for those people that can t make the session but we ve got some guest speakers who are from the RADIUS community. One of the developers from FreeRADIUS for example will be coming along to a couple of the Eduroam clinics over the forthcoming months to deliver information about what s going on in the world of FreeRADIUS 3.x and 2

moving into the world of FreeRADIUS 4 and so there ll be far more information there much, much earlier than waiting for the software to come out and waiting until say next year s Net Workshop, however that s not to say that there won t be a more full presentation of such things at such events. Can you give examples of the types of things covered during a typical clinic? Yes certainly. Some of the things that have come up in the clinic is people saying that they re looking at changing technology. They re going for, for example, a clustered radius system and that s going to be sharing the backend database. They have to have the same shared secrets on each system. If they re unaware, you can do that. You can ensure that different IP addresses have the same shared secrets if you have a cluster system. We have people asking that they re looking to change from, for example, NPS to FreeRADIUS or ISE, Cisco ISE and what should they be looking at. Which bits of the config? What are the bits that are gonna be their main issues and other people that are in these calls who have made the similar move can give their advice and their feedback and how they dealt with it during the upgrades. We tend to have a few little holding pointers and these are used in the e mail notifications and reminders about the sessions such as a brief explanation about what the NAPTR record is and why it s good to have as an Eduroam UK customer NAPTR record on your DNS to improve the roaming authentications of your users when they re away from your site. So we tend to have a few little ice breakers that we can just pull out at each session anyway just as a reminder of what people can do and what they should be doing just to improve the service. Is the clinic only suitable for organisations deploying Eduroam? I believe that the clinic is suitable for not only the organisations who are currently going through the process of deploying Eduroam but also those sites that are currently running an Eduroam service and have been running an Eduroam service for many, many years because many of those sites may not have been revisiting their service offering and understanding that there have been changes to the service, how those changes work or what they affect and likewise those organisations that are deploying Eduroam, whilst there may be topics of discussion that are currently going over their head because it s all new technology to them, by being there they re able to get advice from their peers at other organisations as to what they did to deal with a particular issue. So Alan, how many people typically join every month and what can they expect to gain from an hour at the Eduroam clinic? Typically the numbers joining are a handful through to around a dozen. That s the number that people are happy, in terms of managing the number of people joining the Adobe Connect session because primarily we have quite a few new people coming each month so the first part of the session, people are getting use to the technology, understanding how to mute their mic, drive their mic, turn 3

things off and on and ask questions in the question box. I think it s a lot easier once you ve attended a couple of the sessions. You already know that your system is set up correctly. You know how to deal with it if there s an issue about resetting the mic and going through the sound preferences the technical bit. Once you get used to this, it becomes familiar territory and much like using any programme on your computer, you just go with the flow. For the new members, they have that learning curve. For the people who ve been to clinics before, it s quite good so not only do you learn how to use Adobe Connect which is a useful side effect of these sessions, you also can pick up information from all your other colleagues so within that hour there can be small presentations from people within the RADIUS/Eduroam field but also there can be the presentations from us information about for example the NAPTR records, information about shared secrets, the log files that are on the support server, information about what s happening in our world of monitoring and support so one thing I haven t mentioned so far today is the server provider assurance tool. The little white boxes that are able to monitor your Eduroam service so once you have a working Eduroam service, we can improve the monitoring of that service by deploying one of these monitoring tools on to your system and likewise the new support server that s coming along. We ll be presenting some more screenshots from it over the forthcoming clinics so you can get an idea of what it s like and hopefully there won t be any induction calls required for the new support server because it will be very, very straightforward for the users to use. What advice would you give to anyone thinking of joining the clinic? If you re aware of these podcasts and you ve seen the notifications, the first thing I d suggest is you give it a go. Just go to the training site, sign up for the podcast, join the session at least half an hour before its due to begin if it s your first time so you can make sure that the software is running on your desktop and you ve got the sound audio quality set up correctly. One of the training support staff will be on hand to help you through that so we, if the session starts, we re not distracted by anyone who s still setting things up. See how it goes. See if works for you. See if it s useful for you to attend and whether or not it s something that you feel that it would be good to attend if there s something going on or if there s a particular issue you do want to chat with us, in you know a more direct communication but please remember that if you do have issues with the Eduroam service, please raise a ticket about the service and then we can deal with it proactively and immediately rather than wait around for the clinic so the clinics more of an informal chat shop for Eduroam participants. Thank you Alan today for your time. If you are interested in booking onto our Eduroam live clinic, please visit the training page on the Jisc website jisc.ac.uk/advice/training. The clinics take place on the first Tuesday of every month from 2.30 to 3.30 in the afternoon. For organisations interested in deploying or currently deploying Eduroam, we run two one day training courses. The courses are Eduroam fundamentals and the second one is Implementing Eduroam at your organisation. The next courses are taking place on the 9 th and 4

10 th August in London. You can find details on our training page again at jisc.ac.uk/advice/training. Thank you. Moderator: And cheers thanks for your time too and hope to see any of you at the forthcoming Eduroam clinic and remember to follow us on Twitter #EduroamUK [ENDS] 5