using a wireless router in a hotel

How does one connect to a Hotel internet service
like 'room-on-line' using a wifi-router?

Usually, those services present a web-page and one has to 'accept the
charges'. The system remembers the Mac-address of the client, so
one cannot switch devices easily. The problem is that the router would
have to connect and do the accepting, or at least have some
web-proxy to allow one to do that from the notebook while the
mac-address of the router is actually registered (using that devices'
DHCP client). Do the small 'travel' routers have extra intelligence
(proxy etc) for that? I got a Linksys WRT54GC (which is not touted as a
travel router but just as a compact one) which does not seem to offer
anything to support this?

Should I get a different one (I need the 4 LAN-ports on this one
though, it seems most travel-routers don't have any..)

any help is appreciated
M

Mathias Koerber wrote:
> How does one connect to a Hotel internet service
> like 'room-on-line' using a wifi-router?

I have a D-Link wireless unit just for that purpose. although yours I
think will work too. Here's what I think "how it works": when you power
up your laptop with wifi, it will seek out a wireless network and if
your router is on, it will see your network SSID and negotiate an IP
address as you connect to it and become connected to the router
network. If you then hook up the router to the hotel "wired" ethernet,
and brings up a webbrowser in the laptop, the router will try to seek
out the "homepage" setting of the browser. At that point the hotel
server will not pass your domain name search because your router MAC
address is not recognized as "valid user" and you'll be re-directed to
their agreement/sign-up page.

If the "room-on-linre" is already wifi, then of course you don't need a
wifi router.

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:54:05 +0800, Mathias Koerber
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in <(E-Mail Removed)>:

>How does one connect to a Hotel internet service
>like 'room-on-line' using a wifi-router?
>
>Usually, those services present a web-page and one has to 'accept the
>charges'. The system remembers the Mac-address of the client, so
>one cannot switch devices easily. The problem is that the router would
>have to connect and do the accepting, or at least have some
>web-proxy to allow one to do that from the notebook while the
>mac-address of the router is actually registered (using that devices'
>DHCP client). Do the small 'travel' routers have extra intelligence
>(proxy etc) for that? I got a Linksys WRT54GC (which is not touted as a
>travel router but just as a compact one) which does not seem to offer
>anything to support this?
>
>Should I get a different one (I need the 4 LAN-ports on this one
>though, it seems most travel-routers don't have any..)
>
>any help is appreciated

Use a client bridge, not a router. Then everything is handled from your
computer.

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