Hotel Wifi

[raymac46]

Well Saturday night I stayed at a hotel chain that shall remain nameless (Days Inn.) The hotel advertised free wifi and most reviews were positive. So just to be safe I brought along a Windows laptop. Right.

I got the lappy unpacked fired it up and connected to the wifi gateway. To my dismay it was a totally unsecured hotspot and you had to launch a browser to accept the terms and log in. Eset started giving me grief about an insecure network and I could not reach the login page in any browser. Finally I fiddled with the wifi settings had Windows 10 diagnose the connection and fix the problems. Turns out DHCP wasn't working. After that I got the login page and then I could surf OK.

I wasted no time invoking Private Internet Access though. Eset kept telling me about all the smartphones that were joining the network.

I don't know why a hotel can't have a normally secured wifi network and change the password. Too much trouble?

[V.T. Eric Layton]

They probably just don't know enough about it to realize what a security hazard it is.

[securitybreach]

They probably just don't know enough about it to realize what a security hazard it is.

 

Yeah, most people have no clue how to do even the most basic networking setups.

[goretsky]

Hello,

 

I always like it when I'm traveling and find out the hotel still has wired Ethernet. Plug in, sniff a little traffic to see if I'm on a switched or a bridged connection, and then fire up the VPN connection. About half the time wired is from a different provider than wireless, and since everyone's used wireless it's much faster. The last hotel room I was in consistently had 56Mbit/s up, 49 Mbit/s down.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

Edited June 28, 2017 by goretsky
fixed typo

[raymac46]

Yes I hear you, Aryeh. I always have an Ethernet cable in my backpack but unfortunately this hotel didn't have that option.

[abarbarian]

The last hotel room I was in consistently had 56Mbit/s up, 49 Mbit/s down.

 

Faster than my home broadband.