SSL Problems with StayOnline Hotel Internet Providers

I have been using an HP laptop with Fedora installed at various hotels
and locations across the US. I have been connecting to wireless hotspots
with three different laptops using madwifi and Intel drivers and Fedora
4 through my present Fedora7 configuration without significant issues.

In October, I was in Maui at a Marriott and could connect to the
wireless service and bring up Google, digg, and slashdot, but when I
tried to connect to Gmail, Yahoo-Mail, and my companies OWA-webmail
connections it just never loaded and eventually timed out. The router
was in the suite, so I connected via wire and had the same experience.

I spoke with the StayOnline support person on the 800 number and they
wanted to walk me through diagnostics that were windows based. I tried
to fake it, but I am not very familiar with all the Windows GUI's, so I
had to punt. They told me they ONLY support windows...duh. I dual boot
so I can use IPASS in the airports, so I booted into XP and everything
worked just fine.

I just had the same experience in a Marriott courtyard in Waco last
weekend. Same thing, but I did NOT try windows. I did turn off SELinux
enforcement, and then ALL firewall without any change. I could ssh to a
remote Linux system I have through DynDNS which is also weird to me.
But if I tried to display back through the ssh (I used ssh -X)connection
it timed out.

Has anyone seen a problem like this? Anyone having NO problems with
"StayOnline"? Can we compare configs?

Thanks,

Rick

PS: I can't upgrade to Fed8 yet because the NetWorkManager config for
WPA2-enterprise changed and I can't connect to wireless in my office
anymore. Something about the CA-certificate form.

On 2008-02-07, Rick Stuart <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I have been using an HP laptop with Fedora installed at various hotels
> and locations across the US. I have been connecting to wireless hotspots
> with three different laptops using madwifi and Intel drivers and Fedora
> 4 through my present Fedora7 configuration without significant issues.
>
> In October, I was in Maui at a Marriott and could connect to the
> wireless service and bring up Google, digg, and slashdot, but when I
> tried to connect to Gmail, Yahoo-Mail, and my companies OWA-webmail
> connections it just never loaded and eventually timed out. The router
> was in the suite, so I connected via wire and had the same experience.

I had an odd issue with an FC6 laptop on a hotel wireless network where
any encrypted traffic (ssh, https) would hang after a certain amount.
The fix was to turn off TCP window scaling
(echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling). Some googling revealed
that some routers have issues with TCP window scaling - I don't know why
it only affected encrypted traffic in my case, but the fix may be worth a
shot for you.

--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University