Connecting to public wifi hotspots

[Avi Greenbury]

Colin Law wrote:
> On 19 February 2013 09:37, Patrick Asselman <iceblink at seti.nl> wrote:
> > On 2013-02-19 10:27, Karl Auer wrote:
> > Interesting information, but useless to this thread.
> > Come on people, let's be constructive here, even though maybe the OP is not
> > being the most cooperative.
> >
> > Does anyone have experience using public wifi hotspots that have a login
> > page?
> > If so, how do you go about using these? Is there an easy method?
> 
> The couple of times I have used them they have just worked.  Not tried
> Starbucks however, but even if I had I don't suppose their system is
> the same in every country.

In the UK they're all provided by a BT (British Telecom) service, so I
suspect they'd need to be different abroad.

Generally, though, these hotspots all work in roughly the same way.
Your first request on connecting is not routed out to the Internet as
you'd expect, but to a local server which offers up a login page. Once
you've logged in all your requests go outside as normal.

This used to be normally handled by faking DNS responses (so when you
look up google.com you'd get 192.168.1.1 or something) but I think
it's now more commonly done by forcing all web traffic through a
proxy, and having that return the login page depending on whether the
user is authenticated or not.

Generally, though, these are all mechanisms that should Just Work
anywhere - they're not in the spirit of the various standards they're
exploiting but they're definitely well within the letter. If the
system itself appears to be working (because, for instance, it works
on Windows) there's no reason for it to not work on any client (like
Ubuntu); the fact it isn't definitely points towards a problem in
Ubuntu's handling of the redirects rather than a problem in the
hotspot itself.


-- 
Avi