Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Acer Iconia Tablet A500 Wireless Hack for PEAP

For everyone out there that want's to use their Acer Iconia A500 tablet at work but can't get get around the darn Enterprise level encryption. I hope I have your fix.

Background on my issue is that I bought a A500 tablet along with 2 other co-workers. Then WIFI stopped working for some reason almost exactly 2 weeks after connecting to the Corporation's WIFI network. They use PEAP encryption and require me to enter my username and password. I tried everything for months to get it working again but no luck. The interesting fact is that one of my co-workers had the exact same issue as me but the other co-worker didn't have any problems at all.

I have called Acer about this issue and they were absolutely no help and actually said the Honeycomb OS doesn't support it... FAIL. This issue had nothing to do with the OS.

So after trying everything, yesterday I was tinkering around with it and this is what I did to fix it.

Rebooted-->entered my username in the username\identity field then put characters in the field under that "Anonymous identity", and that's it, then I hit SAVE. Then turned wireless off then on. Then I put my credentials in the correct way with my username in the "identity" field and my password in the "password" field then turned wireless off and back on and then viola. I'm back in business.

I know I know, sounds more like witchcraft then troubleshooting, but it worked for me and and my other co-worker that was having troubles with it.

Let me know if you have any questions.
-Ben

2 comments:

  1. I'm having a very similar problem , but your method isn't seeming to work.
    The one difference I'm noticing between our scenarios is that My a500 keep resetting the Phase 2 authentication field whenever I go back in to modify my settings.
    Any other good ideas on how to solve this?

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  2. I don't recall it hanging on phase 2 authentication. You may have little different setup on your Wireless access requirements. When I connect I only have to put in my username and password then I leave everything else default.

    It can be very tricky at times. I would suggest trying multiple times to see if it works, that is what I had to do.

    My assumption is that it is failing on getting the certificate or renewing the cert. I had tried a hard reset, deleting everything then restoring from scratch and running the WIFI patch and none of them worked. Until tried what I described above.

    Let me know if I can do anything to help out.
    -Spader

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