[TriLUG] Hotel wireless internet and Linux

[Alan Porter]

> I've had the same frustration at other hotels with cat5 and the hotel 
> network.  Same story:  you logon to their networ, a browser window should 
> open up, you enter authorization code, and off you go, except for in 
> Linux.

I had a similar problem in a hotel last month.

The hotel network had a firewall that was blocking all traffic from
me.  To authenticate, all I had to do was turn on "automatic proxy
detection" in firefox and then try to hit ANY web page.  It redirected
me to a "welcome to our hotel proxy" web page, and then apparently
added my MAC address to their firewall.  From then on, I could do
HTTP, SSH, anything I wanted.

It seemed like a weird ritual to go through, since their web proxy
did not actually ask me to enter a code or anything.  It seemed to me
that they installed a fancy firewall but then did not use any of its
features.

I was probably the first person to complain about it.  The typical
web-browsing Windows user would have fired up IE, which comes with
automatic proxy detection turned on by default.

That's what I get for trying SSH first.


Alan




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