Configuring a personal router in a hotel room

Question

I'll be staying in a hotel for a while. The room has a wired ethernet connection. When I plug my netbook directly into this, I can surf the internet. However, I have a second computer with just an ethernet port, and I would like to have a private hard-wired LAN behind the WRT54G (hardware version 3) that I brought while still being able to access the internet.

I have dd-wrt (dd-wrt.v24_mini_wrt54g.bin) installed on the router. Configured with the most basic settings, I can access the router config page with my netbook, but I can't access the internet. These are the settings:

• WAN Connection Type: Automatic Configuration - DHCP
• Network Address Server Settings (DHCP): DHCP Server
• Start IP Address: 192.168.1.100

I read that some hotels associate the assigned IP to your MAC address upon initially connecting. Although I didn't see any kind of hotel "landing page" when I first plugged in my netbook, I did later attempt to clone the netbook's MAC address with the router and assign the netbook's IP to the router as a static IP address. However, my netbook still wasn't able to access the internet from behind the router with this configuration (although it could still access the router's configuration page). Here are screencaps of the WAN and LAN Configuration for this attempt:

There were a few fields that I wasn't sure what to put, including the Gateway address.

My netbook is running Ubuntu 10.10. It is configured for DHCP on eth0.

This private LAN configuration worked in my home. What could be different about the hotel that would cause it not to work?

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NEW EDIT

Ping results: In dd-wrt there is a menu option "Administration -> Commands" that allows you to type in stuff and click "Run Commands". I typed ping -c 3 google.com and it refreshed the page after about 5 seconds with no output. When I typed ping -c 3 173.194.36.104 (the IP address for Google), the output was:

PING 173.194.36.104 (173.194.36.104): 56 data bytes

For curiosity's sake, the output of uname -r was:

2.4.37

I can also log in with telnet, but there is a limited command set available.

Answer 1

Check to see if the router has internet access.

Log into the management software and somewhere under Diagnostics or Tools or Advanced there should be an option to Ping an outside address from the router itself.

Post the results. Most probably the hotel has some sort of authentication software which doesn't allow for a certain range of MAC addresses accesing the connection, you could always check with reception.

If you aren't able to ping an outside server from the router it means something is wrong. Remember, that you should take care to setup the router as a network HUB, that is, you have to direct WAN trafic to the hotel's DHCP server. I get the feeling that right now your router is attempting to get WAN access through its integrated WAN port which would, of course, fail.