Android and Eduroam

Image credit: Copyright Eduroam, used here as fair use to indicate the network in question.

It seems there's a few bugs in various Android variants that prevent a valid routing table being setup when connecting to an institutional eduroam network. The problem, which I have seen people reporting on XDA, occurs when you can get onto the wifi network, but still no resources are available.

You'll need a rooted device to fix this, and it's a clumsy workaround, but here's what I did on the University of Sussex campus.

1.) Dump a valid routing table from a device that works:

sudo route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.0.8.5        *               255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 wlan0
link-local      *               255.255.0.0     U     1000   0        0 wlan0
default         10.0.8.5        0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 wlan0

2.) Shell into your android device and check the routing table there:

route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface

What a surprise, it's empty.

3.) Add a route to your gateway and then a default route using the gateway

route add 10.0.8.5 dev eth0
route add default gw 10.0.8.5 dev eth0
route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.0.8.5        *               255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 eth0
default         10.0.8.5        0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

Hurrah! You are now connected. It's probably worth putting this in a script which you can automatically run with Script Kitty or the such like.

4.) Test connectivity

ping google.com
PING google.com (74.125.230.116) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 74.125.230.116: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=14.8 ms