Wireless at the Westin...
 

Ok, I just spent a week at the Westin in Denver, they had wired internet access in the rooms, each room had a little Cisco router with a 4-port switch in the back. One wire went to somewhere behind the TV set, maybe for movie purchases, and the other I plugged into my laptop.

Plugging in my laptop, I easily grabbed a DHCP lease from the Cisco router and could go to the web page and pay my way in.

However, I usually bring a tiny Linksys wireless router with me on the road, and usually I can just plug it into the room's wired connection and I'm good to go.

However, this time when I plugged in my Linksys to the Cisco, the linksys wouldn't pull a DHCP lease from the Cisco. I tried a couple of different patch cables, and all the right lights were blinking, but it could not get an IP address. My laptop to the Linksys was fine, I could go to the admin pages and try to force it to DHCP renew, but no address from the Cisco.

First I thought that maybe the hotels were getting smart and blocked all the MAC addresses for Linksys router products. I cloned my Thinkpad's MAC address onto the Linksys so the Cisco (I would think) would have no idea that it wasn't my Thinkpad plugged in. No dice.

Putting aside the idea that maybe something is broke on the Linksys, anyone hear of problems trying to plug in your wireless router into the hotel's wired connection?

I've traveled lots and used this setup for some time and I'm a pretty savvy network guy in general, but I could get this Linksys to connect to the hotel Cisco.

On a side note, that Westin in downtown Denver was sold to Mariott this week. Bummer.

Any obvious issues?

Thanks!

I'm not picturing the Cisco model in paticular you're describing but lately Cisco has pumped out a bunch of vertical market specific stuff (did you get a model #?). What I suspect it might be doing is checking for more than one MAC on any given switchport which indicates someone plugging a hub, switch, AP, etc in.

Did you connect the laptop prior to connecting the Linksys? If you did, my guess would be that the newer equipment may be 'smart' and over the 'life' of your paid internet period may only permit one MAC address to inhibit fraud. I've never had a problem at any hotel with my Dlink DWL-G730AP and I've never changed the MAC. I simply plug it in and go, it works flawlessly.

Failing that, I'm not really sure. I don't think it'd be a MAC filtering issue. Linksys makes lots of products including PCMCIA WiFi cards that would use similar MAC addresses.