W-LAN hotspot && firefox ./. Konqueror

Hi,

Some times ago I was traveling to Amsterdam and tried to use in a
hotel the W-LAN AP of http://www.swisscom-eurospot.com/ ...

In the hotel they selled me a card with some code on it and the
how-to use on the card only claimed:

1. set the SSID to 'eurospot'
2. start your browser
3. enter the user ID and password from this card

Note: In the point 2. there was not mentioned any URL to go, just
'start your browser'. I did so and after:

# ifconfig iwi0 ssid eurospot
# dhclient iwi0

(you may note that this is with FreeBSD, but the rest of the problem
has nothing todo with FreeBSD, just with the browser).

From DHCP I got an IP, /etc/resolv.conf but could no go to nowhere,
of course not, because at this point no user ID and password was
entered. So I launched KDE's Konqueror (mine one starts with empty
page), nothing happened (of course not). I tried to go to some
URL in Internet and it did not worked, nothing happened....

I already wanted return the card to the hotel when a colleague said:
try it with Mozilla or Firefox. So I launched Firefox, went to
the same URL which did not worked with Konqueror and ... this
brought up some login-page of
http://login03.swisscom-eurospot.com...=&RadiusReply=
(and not the page of the URL I've put in into firefox) and I could
enter the user ID and password from the card and after this all
worked fine and transparently.

I tried it again and again sometimes to get an idea what's going on and
especially to know why it works this way with Mozilla or Firefox
but not with KDE Konqueror. I've monitored the traffic with
tcpdump as well and all I could figure out is:

- if you start Firefox this automatically makes DNS lookup and
fetches pages from
http://fxfeeds.mozilla.org which is somehow in the bookmarks
of Firefox; note in this case the DNS lookup works;
- the HTTP packages coming back from the request to fxfeeds.mozilla.org
contain a HTTP statement: Location:http://login03.swisscom-eu...
i.e. are pointing to that login page of swisscom-eurospot

- if you start Konqueror, nothing is fetched automatically and
somehow the DNS lookup for any page you want to fetch does
not resolve;

Could someone bring a bit more light into this and has an idea for
the next time how to bring up the W-LAN with KDE Konqueror?

Thx in advance

Matthias
--
Matthias Apitz
Manager Technical Support - OCLC PICA GmbH
Gruenwalder Weg 28g - 82041 Oberhaching - Germany
t +49-89-61308 351 - f +49-89-61308 399 - m +49-170-4527211
e <(E-Mail Removed)> - w http://www.oclcpica.org/ http://guru.UnixLand.de/

Matthias Apitz wrote:

> I tried it again and again sometimes to get an idea what's going on and
> especially to know why it works this way with Mozilla or Firefox
> but not with KDE Konqueror. I've monitored the traffic with
> tcpdump as well and all I could figure out is:
>
> - if you start Firefox this automatically makes DNS lookup and
> fetches pages from
> http://fxfeeds.mozilla.org which is somehow in the bookmarks
> of Firefox; note in this case the DNS lookup works;
> - the HTTP packages coming back from the request to fxfeeds.mozilla.org
> contain a HTTP statement: Location:http://login03.swisscom-eu...
> i.e. are pointing to that login page of swisscom-eurospot
>
> - if you start Konqueror, nothing is fetched automatically and
> somehow the DNS lookup for any page you want to fetch does
> not resolve;

Well, you figured it out. Konqueror's DNS does not work, whereas
Firefox's does. You have the tcpdumps right in front of you. Compare
the two DNS queries and see what is wrong with Konqueror's.

One possibility -- Konqueror might use a cached DNS value or try to use
servers other than the ones sent by DHCP. This will prevent the
hotspot's DNS magic from working.

DS