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Comment by firecall | Hacker News Reader

>while captive portal logins on hotel networks are handled quietly in the background.

Anyone know how it automagically sorts out connecting to the hotel WiFi?

Hotels often want some combination of my room number and surname I've found, or some combination of hotel name and floor password.

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"To connect the UniFi Travel Router to a guest network, open the UniFi Mobile App and select a nearby wireless network. If the network has a captive portal, it will automatically forward to your mobile device for login."

from the FAQ https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/utr

It likely relies on the travel router cloning the MAC address of your phone or whatever you use to authenticate. That way the hotel just thinks the travel router is your phone.

It’s also (I’d hope) modifying the ttl as that’s used to detect travel routers.

Took my PS5 Pro on a work trip. Was livid to find out the horrific 'browser' on the PS5 wasn't able to handle the captive portal login page. $700 gaming rig and it can't load a simple HTML page so I can enter my name and room number?! Ridiculous.

Thought about it for a few minutes and realized that the portal was likely just doing mac filtering. So I adjusted my MacBook Pro's MAC address to be the same as the PS5, went through the portal login and then powered down the MBP. Booted up the PS5 and I was online.

Damn it feels good to be a gangster.

Sometimes it's also possible to simply disconnect the hotel's SIP phone from the Ethernet jack and use that :)

This is the way. Nice job!

It doesn't. You connect it to the hotel wifi and then complete the captive portal requirements on your phone, laptop, etc.

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