A guide to eduroam CAT for institution administrators
eduroam CAT: purpose and scope
eduroam CAT is the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool. Its purpose is to support you, an eduroam Identity Provider administrator, by allowing you to generate customised eduroam installers for various platforms. The customisation includes your IdP's name, location and logo, contact details for your helpdesk, and of course the RADIUS settings which users need to uniquely identify your IdP when roaming. The installers can be produced in many languages; that way, you can even offer your users an installer in their native language! Further to that, eduroam CAT can also assist you in debugging your own RADIUS setup by comparing your inputs to the actual behaviour of your setup in the eduroam infrastructure.
eduroam CAT can make the end-user installers available on its own user download area, or you may choose to download them yourself and distribute them on your institution's own web page. You can also choose to make only a subset of the supported platforms available for direct download, while redirecting users of select platforms to your own support page (e.g. if you have custom installers with non-standard specialities for these platforms).
eduroam CAT supports a variety of of typical end-user client devices. In particular, it can generate eduroam installers for these platforms:
- Microsoft Windows 8
- Microsoft Windows 7
- Microsoft Windows Vista
- Microsoft Windows XP (Service Pack 3)
- Mac OS X Mountain Lion
- Mac OS X Lion
- iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
- many Linux distributions
As of right now, it notably does NOT support Android, sorry. Your helpdesk will have to take care of Android users by other means.
The support for all the above devices covers many common EAP types; however not all EAP types are supported on all platforms - we largely rely on the target Operating System's capabilities.
eduroam CAT is not replacing your helpdesk! While we hope to do you a good service by taking the technical task of generating secure installers for many platforms into our hands, we can not take your users' phone calls or tell them how to fix problems on their computers. The CAT's installers work on the target platforms if they have not been modified beyond reason by the end-user, and we hope the installation process with them is intuitive enough; but we can not give you guarantees that you will not ever hear from failing users again.
To see how the end-user area looks like, just hop over to https://cat-test.eduroam.org. You can select any institution, like "RESTENA Foundation" in Luxembourg, to get to the download page of the installers for that institution.