using a wireless router in a hotel

Jun 25, 2006 2 Replies
M

How does one connect to a Hotel internet service like 'room-on-line' using a wifi-router?



Usually, those services present a web-page and one has to 'accept the charges'. The system remembers the Mac-address of the client, so one cannot switch devices easily. The problem is that the router would have to connect and do the accepting, or at least have some web-proxy to allow one to do that from the notebook while the mac-address of the router is actually registered (using that devices' DHCP client). Do the small 'travel' routers have extra intelligence (proxy etc) for that? I got a Linksys WRT54GC (which is not touted as a travel router but just as a compact one) which does not seem to offer anything to support this?



Should I get a different one (I need the 4 LAN-ports on this one though, it seems most travel-routers don't have any..)



any help is appreciated M


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C

I have a D-Link wireless unit just for that purpose. although yours I think will work too. Here's what I think "how it works": when you power up your laptop with wifi, it will seek out a wireless network and if your router is on, it will see your network SSID and negotiate an IP address as you connect to it and become connected to the router network. If you then hook up the router to the hotel "wired" ethernet, and brings up a webbrowser in the laptop, the router will try to seek out the "homepage" setting of the browser. At that point the hotel server will not pass your domain name search because your router MAC address is not recognized as "valid user" and you'll be re-directed to their agreement/sign-up page.

If the "room-on-linre" is already wifi, then of course you don't need a wifi router.

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J

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:54:05 +0800, Mathias Koerber wrote in :

Use a client bridge, not a router. Then everything is handled from your computer.

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