Members of the Client Support staff enjoy friendly, back-and-forth banter about which is better … Mac or PC. We have three staff members, in particular, who laud the prowess of all things Apple.
Lindsay is one of those people. She had everyone in the office talking when she returned from her vacation out west with an iPhone. For many of us, this was our first time seeing one LIVE, up close, and in person. I sheepishly asked if I could hold it. She told me not to feel embarrassed. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who made such an odd request. Lindsay pointed her way through different screens like she was Steve Jobs. I watched in awe as she tilted the phone to its right to show me a video being played in horizontal screen mode.
"Where is this all going?" I wondered to myself and will I one day own an iPhone of my very own? Not for another two years, at least. I just renewed my Verizon Wireless contract and upgraded to an LG VX8600. I’m so yesterday’s news.
Anyway, we urged Lindsay to blog about her iPhone discoveries because students will undoubtedly be coming back to campus as proud owners of iPhones this fall. Lindsay agreed to share her test results with me, so here is what we’ve learned.
The iPhone will connect to AirNet, the service that provides campus wireless access to Stony Brook University faculty, staff and students. You can log in through the web for limited network access with no problem. This will let you surf the web a lot faster than AT&T’s Edge Network will allow you to. The downside is that you can’t send or receive email while using AirNet’s limited network access.
You can connect to Stony Brook’s VPN (virtual private network) to gain access to your email through the mail client on the iPhone.
This is how you connect to the VPN:
- Hit Settings on your iPhone’s main menu.
- Scroll down and select General
- Next, click on Network
You will come to a screen that looks like this:
- Click on VPN
- Select Settings underneath
- Choose PPTP
- Enter server address: pptp.airnet.stonybrook.edu
- Account name is your NetID
- Password is your NetID password. You should get an alpha/numeric keypad to type this in.
There appears to be a glitch that occurs when your phone goes to sleep (when this happens you lose your connection to the VPN) or if you leave the VPN and come back to it at another time. When you go in again, you have to turn your VPN on and repeat the above steps. Otherwise, you will only get a numeric keypad to type in your NetID at the password screen when you try to use the VPN shortcut. You will not be able to type in alpha characters.
Lindsay’s way around this was to go into Windows and change her NetID password to all numerics. You don’t have to do this. In fact, we do not encourage it. You can go back into the VPN Settings each time to put in your NetID password without changing it. Our Division of Information Technology Security Officer advises that an all-numeric password is very insecure and should not be used as a password on any Stony Brook University system.
Lindsay said a lot of people with iPhones are encountering this bug. It is currently being discussed on some forums.
We’ll wait for the software update and in the meantime keep asking Lindsay if we can hold her iPhone!
