connecting to wifi in a self created certificate enterprise environment

Basically, my office environment needs me to connect with a self signed certificate for our wifi, and in GNU/Linux, this was a lot harder than I expected.

In short, you can't use the default/easy to use nmcli. But you have to set your username/password directly in the wpa_supplicant conf, and just connect directly with the wpa_supplicant program.

This is what works

you can get the list of SSIDs available by

nmcli device wifi list

# 1 make this file
################################################################################
# /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
network={
ssid="XXX"
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
identity="your_username"
password="your_password"
}

################################################################################

# enable wpa_supplicant (connect to wifi)
wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211 -iwlx00018e8e09f2 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf


#then you have to do dhclient to get an IP
sudo dhclient wlx00018e8e09f2

This is what I also needed to do for my crappy wifi usb card

ended up creating a script to enable my crappy usb wifi

################################################################################
modprobe rt2800usb


echo "0789 0168" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rt2800usb/new_id

# wpa_supplicant -B -Dnl80211 -iwlx00018e8e09f2 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211 -iwlx00018e8e09f2 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

sleep 3
echo killing initial wpa_supplicant
killall wpa_supplicant

sleep 3
echo starting final wpa_supplicant

Some of the things I tried and didn't work

nmcli doesn't work as it NEEDS to do cacert validation, apparently that
can't be disabled on the program...

this also didn't work

dconf write /org/gnome-nm-applet/eap/70b2f88f-1c43-45e0-acd5-276f66bd0b98/ignore-phase2-ca-cert false

dconf write /org/gnome-nm-applet/eap/70b2f88f-1c43-45e0-acd5-276f66bd0b98/ignore-ca-cert true

this works for non enterprise wifi devices I guess

nmcli device wifi connect XXX username XXX password XXX