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Simple trick
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Last time I went on vacation, the hotel wifi wouldn't let my laptop on for some reason, but my phone was fine. The portal to log in just wouldn't come up on my laptop.
So I took my phone off the wifi and just spoofed my phone's MAC address on the laptop. Did that for the whole week I was there.
I used a travel router at the last hotel I was at but didn’t realize the firmware was buggy — it wouldn’t respond to DNS queries whatsoever on my personal network.
I unfortunately forgot my Ethernet cable so it was a real challenge.
Remembering that iOS uses Wi-Fi Privacy (changes MAC address constantly) I just brought up their portal on my phone, signed in, cloned the MAC address then on iOS chose “Forget this Network.”
Worked like a charm! (Then the travel router updated its firmware and DNS was back on track.)
What was incredibly strange about my situation was that it was initially a DNS problem, it couldn't resolve the addresses tha tthe hotel wifi wanted it to get to for the portal. I double checked, and basic DNS queries were working, just not those ones.
So I figured, I'll go on my phone, grab the IP addresses it's connecting to, stick those in my hosts file, and they'll get resolved. Well, this worked for the first portal address, but the one it redirected to couldn't be reached. Nothing I tried worked, so I had to do what I described above.
Nice workaround!
In my situation the hotel’s DNS was properly giving out the IP address to its portal but the travel router wouldn’t respond whatsoever to DNS queries. Wireshark on a laptop showed no traffic whatsoever back; that was the firmware bug they’d addressed in the update. (DNS on the router itself going out to the hotel network was fine though.)
I did this once to get on Xbox live cause the Xbox doesn't (or didn't, idk I'm PC now) open the web portal for you to agree to.
So I just changed my hardware address to my laptop's after I went through the portal in a web browser.
No problems. That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a network engineer. The fact that it worked was just so damn cool.
I didn't think of that at all! Brilliant!
If you've got a VPN running, it won't work. Turned it off and the prompt came right up
Nah, I don't typically run a VPN.