[TriLUG] Hotel wireless internet and Linux

[Rick DeNatale]

On 5/31/05, Rock Roskam <Rock.Roskam at sas.com> wrote:
> I used a Mariott the other week.  The connection process was tough.  You had to wade through several pages of choices to choose a connection.  I also had to call to tell them to turn on the connection to the room.  I had to boot into windows to obtain my IP address then rebooted into linux.

That sounds like you had a wired connection. In my case the hotel
provided wireless access.  There was nothing to wade through since I
couldn't get a basic wi-fi connection.  I do know that my card was
seeing quite a few access points with the essid of "etwireless" and
one "linksys". I tried associating with the linksys in the hope that
if someone had failed to change the default essid, maybe they had left
it open, but no joy.

I suspect that there will be differences between the various Marriotts
because they don't seem to have a corporate standard for providing
internet and the different properties use different solutions.  We'd
stayed at another Marriott property in NJ earlier on the trip, and
they only had wired access, and unfortunately my laptop lacks built-in
ethernet, and I'd forgotten to pack my ethernet pc card.

When I had the troubles with the wireless hook up in VA, I asked the
front desk if there were any special tricks to make it work, and the
best they could do was offer to loan me a wireless connection kit. But
that was an external wifi adapter which needed to plug in to both an
ethernet port and a usb port (for power) so that was a no go as well.