This slightly technical web page explains all the main points about 802.1X networking.
What might be blocking the connection is that your MacBook can’t cross authentication particulars to your college’s community authentication server. In different phrases, gadgets you need to connect with your MacBook’s WiFi can’t authenticate in opposition to the college’s community. That is truly a very good factor for safety causes.
Not figuring out the precise networking settings your college supplies makes a fuller rationalization troublesome.
The textual content beneath is copied verbatim from @grawity’s hyperlink within the feedback beneath. I need to thank @grawity for giving the proper reply for all of us.
There are two explanations [as to why the original answer isn’t true] that interleave a bit; both of them may be sufficient by itself and make the opposite moot, however each are essential for normal understanding.
One preliminary level to bear in mind is that there isn’t any single entity that may very well be referred to as “the community” that you’d authenticate to; a community solely exists so far as it is made out of distinct gadgets that hopefully are configured the identical, however finally deal with issues like authentication independently from one another.
Individually from that, there are not less than two distinct networks – the Ethernet/Wi-Fi (“native community” or “bodily community”) layer and the IP (“internetwork”) layer – that every have their very own logic and tools. Whereas I am intentionally avoiding the retrofitted OSI-model terminology, its normal thought continues to be related: the tools that includes an Ethernet/Wi-Fi community principally would not care about what sort of IP or non-IP information it is carrying.
802.1X originates as an Ethernet expertise, meant for limiting entry to particular person ports of an Ethernet swap. The best way it really works there’s that you simply join your pc to an Ethernet port and it’s a must to authenticate to that specific swap earlier than it “opens” the port for sending/receiving Ethernet-level packets.
Though the auth messages are [usually] forwarded to a central level for analysis, they nonetheless end in a really localized standing change; your swap marks your port as ‘open’ whereas the remainder of the community (past that particular swap) is unaware of any authentication having been performed.
As soon as the port is open, it’s open for transmission of any information – because the authentication is dealt with by Ethernet tools, it has no restrictions on what sort of IP (or non-IP) packets could go over it.
The place 802.1X is used with Wi-Fi (as WPA-Enterprise), it occupies the identical place as WPA-Private/PSK (i.e. not as a further safety layer however strictly as a substitute; the person Wi-Fi entry factors (APs) deal with each sorts the identical approach); and each sorts of WPA more-or-less mimic the Ethernet habits, in that your pc nonetheless authenticates to that specific access-point earlier than the AP “opens” the port for sending/receiving Ethernet-level packets. (Certainly the WPA messages are precisely Ethernet 802.1X messages, and lots of working programs use the identical software program for WPA as they do for Ethernet 802.1X.)
After all, there isn’t any such factor as bodily ports in a wi-fi community, however Wi-Fi nonetheless has an idea of ‘affiliation’ that roughly represents an Ethernet-like connection, tied to your machine’s MAC tackle.
A big faculty’s Wi-Fi community will include many Wi-Fi entry factors, however the machine at all times associates to a selected one at any given time, and solely that single entry level will relay your information to/from the community, thus it acts more-or-less like your ‘community port’ for the period. (While you transfer round, the machine will roam – affiliate to a unique entry level, which often includes a complete new 802.1X authentication to the brand new AP, whereas the earlier AP forgets about you.)
As soon as your machine associates to the entry level, its “port” is “closed” till the WPA authentication is completed; and as soon as authenticated, the AP will start tp relay something from the machine’s MAC tackle. The mechanism is similar for each WPA-Private and WPA-Enterprise – though the previous is evaluated by the AP itself whereas the latter is [usually] forwarded to a central server for analysis, the end result continues to be localized inside the Wi-Fi AP.
Thus, gadgets don’t authenticate to the community as a complete – they authenticate to the bodily machine they connect with; and when “hotspot” or “web sharing” is in use, ‘borrowing’ gadgets solely must authenticate to the ‘sharing’ machine which then relays information on their behalf. They do not must additional authenticate to the unique Wi-Fi entry level as a result of they don’t have any bodily connection to it.
A lot of the earlier rationalization is definitely moot, because the second level is that “hotspot” or “web sharing” mode often is in-built such a approach that it turns the machine into a totally functioning ‘wi-fi router’.
That’s, a smartphone in “hotspot” mode (or a laptop computer in “web sharing” enabled) will even have its personal IP subnet for its purchasers; it can situation IP addresses by way of DHCP; and most significantly, it can carry out IP-level NAT to “cover” its purchasers’ IP addresses from the broader community. So far as the community is anxious, the entire ‘borrowing’ gadgets are invisible, neither at Ethernet/Wi-Fi layer (on account of routing), nor at IP layer (on account of NAT) – it is as if the only ‘sharing’ machine originates each single packet.
(There’s a approach to detect, at IP stage, that one thing is behind the ‘sharing’ machine – it is how some networks are capable of forbid hotspot/tethering fully – however it on no account includes 802.1X or WPA authentication, and it can’t actually discern what number of gadgets or what sort of gadgets are behind.)
Thus, even when there have been some type of authentication at the next stage above the bodily Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection – such because the “captive portal” browser-based login screens that public networks use – because of NAT, the ‘sharing’ machine would nonetheless have the ability to piggyback by itself authentication to relay packets from the ‘borrowing’ gadgets in a approach that the community remained unaware of them.
