Connecting to public wifi hotspots

[Avi Greenbury]

JD wrote:
> Lost access to internet at home and so, I finally decided
> to take it to a public hotspot to update ubuntu.
> 
> When I click on the NetworkManager (henceforth NM), icon I select the SSID
> that is open (usually, at&t wifi, or some other nearby hotspot
> which is also open).
> 
> NM does indeed connect, sets up the default route and populates
> /etc/resolv.conf and assigns an ip address to my wifi interface wlan0.

What's that IP address? When you're connected what do you get as DNS
servers in resolv.conf, and can you reach them? If you're given
dns.somewhere.net as a DNS server, you could query it directly for
google.com's IP address from the command line like this:

    dig @dns.somewhere.net google.com

If you can't do that, can you ping your default gateway? You can get
you default gateway by opening a terminal and doing sudo route -n,
which will show something a little bit like this, though probably
without the virbr0 and with a wlan0:

    avi at amazing:~$ sudo route -n
    [sudo] password for avi: 
    Kernel IP routing table
    Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
    0.0.0.0         192.168.99.1    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0   0   eth0
    169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     1000   0   0   eth0
    192.168.99.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0   0   eth0
    192.168.122.0   0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0   0   virbr0
    avi at amazing:~$ 

Your default gateway is the entry under 'gateway' that isn't 0.0.0.0;
in this case that's 192.168.99.1.

-- 
Avi