At 01/07/06 10:12, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Saturday 07 January 2006 10:49, Dave Grosvold wrote:
Kevin -- Just because you can "see" a network doesn't necessarily mean you can associate with it. The network would have to be set to open association and no encryption. It's highly likely that most of the networks visible were at least minimally secured networks for businesss other than the hotel. Your hotel should be able to at least tell you the correct BSSID for their network. This sad state of affairs is usually the case in hotels - they buy the wireless service from some third party, and have no one on staff who can even explain what the SSID of their network is, let alone support it. The hotel management doesn't care that the third party can't adequately support it since they don't care if you ever connect. They just want to be able to advertise the fact that they have wireless Internet.
And some hotel setups for wireless use a web interface to allow access.
You can connect to the wireless system but you can't do anything with it (all traffic is essentially blocked) until you try to use your browser. At which point the system will intercept the call and "Welcome you to <such and such> hotel" and please enter the password. Once you enter the password obtainable (hopefully) from the front desk, you can access the internet.
Don't know if wired is different from wireless in requiring the password, but with the hotel I've been using for the last several trips, all I had to do on the Web page was a) choose the free, daily log in requirement vs the for-fee long term connection, and b) accept the user agreement. Then I was onto the Internet. No password required. Eric Hines There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. --Bertrand Russell