Recently a new customer contacted us regarding the integration of OS X devices into his already deployed WiFi infrastructure.

They have several access points that create a company wide WPA2 Enterprise 802.1X network. WiFi access is controlled by a Windows RADIUS server and requires a per user certificate that can be obtained from the Windows Certification Service.

Until now they manually requested the certificate on a Windows machine using MMC‘s Certificate Snap-In and transfered it to the Mac’s user Keychain.

Solution

This steps can be automated with the help of the Windows Web Certificate Service and OS X Lion’s Configuration Profiles.

Here’s what you need:

• Windows Web Certificate Service (http://certserv.mydomain.private/certsrv)
  Details can be found in the MSDN.
• OS X Lion or higher
• Hand-written configuration profiles as described in Apple’s KB entry.
  You can download my demo profiles here.

If you also have to support older Mac OS X versions you can use the Web Certificate Service to semi-automate the process. Additionally other operating systems (like GNU/Linux) are also able to obtain certificates!