Ethernet / ethereal ?

Hi,

I don't know about Ethereal, but I was in a hotel in Florida last year, and first thing I needed a special network cable from the front desk and get them to "enable" the RJ45 port in my room to start working.

Then, when I first tried to connect to the Internet, it re-routed me to a website to register and agree to terms, etc. Once that was done, I was able to connect to the Internet.

Like I said, I don't know how they did all this, but I would have guessed that it was something akin to a VLAN where you can enable ports on a switch probably somewhere in the hotel.

Jim

In article , LWG wrote: :I was using a hotel network and was curious about what was out there so I :brought up ethereal. I started a capture and could not see any traffic. I :was just curious about why? Is there something different about the way they :have built there network?

Possibly yes. There are some routers available that listen for ARP packets on interfaces, and reply back as if they were the target address (on the assumption that the first thing arp'd for would be the gateway IP of the network the user's equipment is set up for. In this way, no matter what gateway address the user's equipment is set up for, the user gets connected without having to reconfigure.

These routers can handle multiple ports with the same IP address -- they use distinct internal IP addresses per port and do NAT at the port level.

All of this relies upon separation of segments -- otherwise the user in room 10B who happens to be using IP gateway 192.168.0.1 could end up with their traffic mixed with the user of room 28C who also happens to be using an IP gateway of 192.168.0.1 . Thus, this equipment would take extra care to be sure the ports were not talking to each other.

But the answer could be a lot more simple than that: they could just use a regular switch (say a Cisco 3550) with the port protection facility turned on to prevent traffic from flowing between ports. Or they could put every room into a different VLAN and put on an ACL that blocks ARP and other broadcast packets from flowing between ports. Recall that if you are using switched segments, then the only traffic you will see on your segment is traffic that you generate, or that is destined to you, or which is sent to a broadcast or multicast MAC and the switch thinks that maybe your segment might happen to have a suitable destination. Block those broadcast packets and you block everything except local traffic.

That's what Cisco calls "private VLAN" (have a look at

While still in the same broadcast domain only the gateway is able to see all other members.

Arnold

Brant, interesting approach, the squid proxy. However, this Radisson has no registration. I just plugged in the cat5 on the desk in the room and away I went. Full news, no proxied web browsing etc. The performance is great and appears to be totally open...

LWG,

I think that Brant made his comment in response to something I mentioned in my post :)...

Jim

LWG wrote:

The page that directed you to register before accessing the Internet was, in all likelihood, was sent to you by a transparent proxy. Squid has this capability, as do many other devices on the market.

Good to know. Now if I ever go into the spamming business, I know where to stay.