[PLUG] 'Net access from hotels

[Eric Harrison]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Michael Rasmussen wrote:

>Usually you can ssh to your office.
>
>When I was in Sidney Montana recently (pop 1,200 and big for the area) the hotel
>had a Win95 box in the lobby on DSL for customer Internet access.  For ssh to 
>the world:
>
>	http://www.google.com
>	search "putty download" click on "I'm feeling lucky"
>	click on link for putty.exe
>	select option to run from server
>	ssh away!
>
>The same technique can work from airport Internet kiosks.


Real men <beating my chest in an ape-like fashion> have mindterm
on a box that allows 0/0 http & ssh access. Why go through all
the trouble of installing software when java is usually enabled?

Travel war stories/tips:

Linux Expo Toronto (2000), I was with a number of people who (then and
now) hold high positions in the free-software world were "escorted"
out of the onlinejobs.com (or some other "hot at the time" job search
company) office for trying to hack the kiosk in their lobby. I managed
to break out using mindterm just seconds before the security guy 
showed up...

Many of the charge-for-DSL/Wireless setups I've seen only block
port 80, a few do DNS as well. If you know the IP address of a
server you have SSH access to, such info may not be be releavant.

At LWCE NY, we had an interesting experience. The SSID was 
"surf here", but it was really flaky. We managed to see that
port 80 was redirected to a "signup here" page. We called the
support number listed to complain that we were getting a bad connection
and they told us to call the hotel front desk and have them reboot the
AP (bad sign!). The front desk told us that there was no such AP in the
hotel. Call the other number back, relay the news, and they dig in further.
Turns out that the AP is in a phone booth (or something like that) a
block away from where we were. We found that if we held our laptops at
a 45 degree angle, DHCP + SSH suited our needs ;-)

-Eric