pdes

I am currently in a hotel room with a wired connection. My Netgear PR2000 Trek detects Internet connection and I am connected though my tablet to the Trek so can configure the router. I am trying to use the Ethernet wired connection to support my wireless devices in the room. I have run the router's wizard but this tell me I have a comms error so have tried to configure manually according to the setup docs. It's one of these hotels that provides free access but you have to log on though their Web page. The WiFi is terrible hence the determination to get this fixed.

I have set the mac address to be the tablet's and have factory reset the router so that I have run the wizard from scratch in accordanc with the manual and other Netgear faq docs. Should I try AP mode? I have obsessed over this for three days so would really appreciate some guidance.

(Or is this a lost cause? Can the hotel block this setup?)

Thanks

tentseller

YES

unmesh

Since setting up a wireless router is the easiest of the travel scenarios, your posting motivated me to download the user manual for this device.

You should be using the instructions that say Internet Connection at Home Setup. It says to connect the Ethernet wire to the WAN (blue) port, apply power, move the switch to the "wired" position, connect a PC/laptop/tablet to the router through either an Ethernet cable or wirelessly using the Netgear's SSID and to run the wizard.

This is similar/identical to every travel router I've used (and I have several!) and you should not need to clone the MAC address etc. Can you reset the Netgear to factory state and try the simple configuration process?

boberonicus

No, it can be quite difficult to setup a wireless router when staying at a hotel. Sometimes the wireless router has trouble with the hotel's portal page. In these cases, people first attach their PCs into the wall directly, get through the portal, then clone the MAC address of their PC as the wireless router's MAC address. Sometimes even that doesn't work.

tentseller

I know for a fact that some hotel's free service is not easily routed to multiple devices.

unmesh

I've been fortunate in always being able to connect, then, especially when the uplink is a wired one as in the OP's case. Hopefully I will be up to the challenge when I come across a situation where I have to work around a roadblock they've set up.

I've read where they do an OUI lookup of the connecting MAC address to ascertain it is a client device and not a network one but anything more sophisticated would require going up the network stack and get expensive for the operator.

docbert

This depends on the router, and on the hotel. I was one of the beta testers for this particular router (see my brief review on flyertalk), and in general it should be relatively easy as it does a good job of detecting the environment, but I've used other travel routers where this was far from true...

As you've said, make sure the switch is in the Wired position, and the cable from the hotel is plugged into the "Internet" (blue) port. There should be no need for MAC address cloning unless you've already logged into the hotels internet via the computer and are trying to avoid getting charged twice.

It's also worth considering that a lot of hotels no longer offer wired internet - eve if they still have the ethernet port for historic reasons. Try using "Wireless" mode and connecting to the hotels Wifi and see if that works any better.

I'd love to know how. Presuming the router is setup correctly, they see it as a single host - just like any other device.

tentseller

It is done by the hotel internet service subcontractor.

Most hotel's internet access and support for such are subcontracted out. I only deal with the business end.

Zarf4

I'm confused by this response. If all traffic is run through the router then the only visibility the internet provider has is the MAC address. Doesn't matter if it's a major ISP, the hotel itself, a subcontractor, or the 16 year old down the street hacked into the hotel intranet.

I have seen hotels block connections to routers where the router MAC hasn't been spoofed... Say the first 3 bytes of the MAC signify a manufacturer code of Linksys the ISP rejects the connection based on the Layer 2 id -- makes sense, Linksys doesn't make a laptop or smartphone so the most logical reason is someone wants to redistribute the service among multiple devices. (Just agreeing & reiterating what unmesh said before)

If there is some other way a spoofed router can be detected I'd love to know too.

tentseller

I have no idea how it is done. All I know that hotels pay for the internet service with direct support for its guest as a fix rate per month base on number of rooms.

unmesh

Deep packet inspection techniques implemented in standalone devices or embedded in high end edge routers can reconstruct the bit stream to higher levels of the ISO stack and can extrapolate all kinds of information about the traffic using heuristics but this analysis is a) expensive and b) error prone. For example, if the connected device is using unusual ports for HTTP traffic, is it NAT or just a computing client using obscure ports for security?

It is hard to imagine the economic justification for the provider of Internet services to hotel rooms to do it.

angatol

.....

Zarf4

Agree that it's extremely unlikely that hotel providers would be sophisticated enough to look for different browser clients or perform deep packet inspections but I had one strange case -

I run a Linux-based OpenVPN server at home on port 443/TCP. At one Dublin hotel I could not make a VPN connection however it would happily let me browse to my bank over HTTPS. Only thing I can think of is that they were looking for the unencrypted HTTPS handshake (sharing TLS cipher suites, etc.) which wasn't happening with the VPN.

About multiple port 80 destination requests -- remember the old days when you'd go to a mistyped site & get 100 popup/unders for adult sites? Those would cause a bit of fun for some hotel wanting to monitor unusual traffic.

angatol

.....

pdes

I have covered all of these suggestions and agree that it shouldn't be difficult but no matter whether I use the default, pc, or spoofed address, I cannot access the Internet. The router sees the Internet connection as 'good' but never makes the connection. Still baffled!