Wireless Access

I'm trying to use my school campus' aruba wifi network but am having loads of trouble with it, and I'm hoping someone here can help.

I'm having these problems with a MacBook running OS 10.6.8, Firefox 26.0, and Safari 5.1.10. With my other wireless device, an iPhone 5 running iOS 7, I have not encountered these problems.

There doesn't seem to be any pattern to where I encounter barriers, but I encounter them every time I try to use the campus network.

I encounter the barriers at seemingly random parts of the connection process. Below are the steps I take to connect to the websites I need to use, and in bold are the steps where I'm stopped (in other words, I can go no further than the step in bold).

1. I select campus wifi network via airport dropdown menu
2. I open browser and enter URL of campus website
3. browser successfully connects to campus website
   
4. I enter login credentials (username and password)
5. browser presents login credential acceptance and redirection notification screen
6. browser redirects to campus website
7. I enter URL of a website I want to go to
8. browser successfully presents the website I want to go to*

*Yesterday I got all the way to step 8, but the browser would load some websites and not others. For instance I could go to google.com, but not gmail.com.

Today I could go no further than Step 2.

Two days ago I could go no further than step 5.

I've looked on the forums here for solutions, and wasn't able to find one, but I did learn how to do record a packet trace via this discussion here:

"Wireless denying access to a website ( stumbleupon )"
http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Unified-Wired-Wireless-Access/Wireless-denying-access-to-a-website-stumbleupon/m-p/28640/highlight/true#M7609

which led me to the instructions on packet tracing:

"Mac OS X: How to capture a packet trace"

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3994

In the "stumbleupon" discussion above, an Aruba employee suggested that the person with the website access problem submit some captured packet traces in order to diagnose the problem. Would that be a possibility now for the problem I'm having?

I would contact your school's IT department to get that resolved.

One of our biggest issues here at Brandeis is that users don't let us know when they are having issues! We can't fix what we don't know about.

Please, please, please contact your school's help desk.

I wish I could contact our school's IT staff; I've been trying. But apparently, at this school I'm currently going to, IT personnel are only allowed to help staff-members of the institution, not students. I've asked about 10 different staff members now for any IT contact anywhere on campus who might be able to help with my issue, and they seem afraid to even admit that the school has IT staff, let alone direct me to them. :( So, students like myself are completely on their own. Hence my post here.

Without access to the wireless equipment or any knowledge of the network topology, unfortunately there is not a whole lot of troubleshooting that we can do.