What are my responsibilities as eduroam sys admin?

Download as PDFDownload as PDF

Updated: 22/10/2020

Lead eduroam system administrator

In order to facilitate resolution of serious and urgent technical problems and abuse issues, all organisations participating in eduroam(UK) must provide e-mail and (normal business hours) telephone contact details for the lead eduroam system administrator at the organisation. This is the individual who will be trusted with the credentials to access the eduroam(UK) Support server portal. The lead eduroam system administrator for your organisation in the first instance is defined on the eduroam(UK) membership application form.

Service and security advisories recipient

eduroam(UK) may from time to time need to send service alerts, notices and security advisories to participating organisations. All registered users on Support server will be added to the jiscmail list eduroamuk-support. This is a moderated list that only eduroam(UK) may post notices to. It is a mandatory requirement of the Technical Specification that member organisations have at least one contact on the mailing list. When user accounts are disabled/deleted on Support server, the e-mail address will automatically be removed from the eduroamuk-support mailing list.

Nb. Many organisations may wish to provide service desk contact details for receiving service alerts and advisories. This is perfectly understandable since this ensures that important notices receive appropriate attention at member organisations. So in addition to individual Support server access accounts, organisations may register role-based addresses but only on condition that these are set as read-only.

'Primary User' - the functional distinction between a primary user account and a normal sys admin account was removed with the release of Support Server 2. The definition was retained with the launch of Support Server 2 to ensure compatibility and to enable the migration of user accounts from old Support Server.

Adding further contacts for your organisation

You can use your Support Server account to add further (Jisc CRM-registered) technical contacts for your organisation. (If the new contacts are not registered in the main Jisc CRM database, JSD can do this for you, then you will be able to add the details to Support). It is useful to have additional technical contacts registered in eduroam(UK) Support since certain support issues can only be discussed with trusted, registered contacts.

Adding a new contact. Click on the 'Configure' tab on Support server and scroll down to the blue 'Accounts' panel. page Click on 'Home' on the top menu bar and from the left hand menu panel click on 'my account'. Admin users may click on the [Add user] button. Enter the required details. If the user is to be another sys admin, select 'Admin' from the User type drop down list. If the user is to have read only access to the Support portal, select 'Read only'. Click on [Save].

Change of Primary user (for receipt of alerts)

Since it is essential that service alerts and advisories are received by member organisations, the facility to opt out of receipt of such notices by setting a user account as 'Admin' rather than Primart Admin' (Admin(p)) was removed with the release of Support Server 2.

Encryption of e-mail facility

The facility to encrypt e-mails to be sent to you by the support team was discontinued with the release for Support server 2. This facility is no longer available.

Leaving your organisation/changing roles

If a change of eduroam sys admin staff takes place at your organisation or a sys admin leaves the organisation, you or your eduroam Management contact should advise JSD (and hence eduroam(UK)) of the change. This allows us to update our records and to invite the new sys admin to benefit from a re-induction/Joiner's Pack refresh from the eduroam(UK) tech team. You may also wish to do a formal hand over of instruction on how to work with Support Server to the new person.

New eduroam sys admins

If you are coming newly into the above role, you should have received your account credentials to access eduroam(UK) Support Server when your account was created on the system. It is to be hoped that there will have been a hand over that covered the features and capabilities of the Support server. If you would like a refresher or re-induction to the service, which will cover Support Sserver, please request this via the Jisc Service Desk.

eduroam system admin responsibilties

As eduroam sys admin for your organisation, your responsibilities include:

Keeping eduroam Support up to date - (follow link to Implementation Roadmap and scroll down to section 21)

Maintaining RADIUS logging - (follow link to Implementation Roadmap and scroll down to section 16)

Monitoring operational status of your ORPS - (follow link to Implementation Roadmap and scroll down to section 17)

Keeping in contact with the eduroam sys admin community

You may find it beneficial to subscribe to the ‘eduroam-uk@jiscmail.ac.uk’ e-mail discussion list which many from our sys admin community subscribe to. Whilst it is not overly active, many of our community find this useful.