Re: Question on public WIFI access points

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

I was able to access the registration page when running W2K in a Parallels
VM on top of FC5. The behavior was identical to that of native Windows,
i.e. when I opened up Firefox the registration page was there. After I had
it assign an IP to me I was able to do an ifup wlan0 and then access the
Internet from Linux. Bringing up native Firefox on FC5 didn't get anything.

So now I'm even more confused, how is Windows making the connection to the
registration web page before the IP is assigned? Windows had to go through
Linux to get to the WiFi hardware, so it must be possible to do the same
thing natively. Does anyone have any theories?

Watch the traffic in both cases with tcpdump to see what the diff is;

I was once in a hotel in NL where I got an IP from AP but could not
go nowhere with KDE/FreeBSD Konqueror; I already wanted to give up
when a colleague said: fire up Firefox. I did so and put it some URL
and magically came up the login page of the provider for paying
the fee and after that everything worked. I watched as well with
tcpdump and saw that Firefox, before going to the URL, wanted to phone
home and this DNS request was answered by the AP/provider, while all others
DNS request were not. Bottom line: somehow the providers know what
certain system is doing first and combining that with the login
logic.

Bad world :-((

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 <m.apitz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> - w http://www.oclcpica.org/ http://guru.UnixLand.de/
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