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Comment by upcoming-sesame

15 hours ago

How do you handle captive portals in hotels ?

Usually you connect your laptop/phone to the portable router network, which then just pulls up the captive portal. Once you auth from one device, any device behind the router is authed with the portal. This is because the hotel network just sees your router's IP/MAC.

Connect on your phone or other device. Connect to travel router. Clone the mac address of your device. Connect router to wifi. Adjust device to not auto login. Good to go.

  • GL.iNet routers don't even need this. It has an option to pass through captive portals. So you connect to your GL.iNet AP, then you set it up for the hotel WiFi, tick the option for passing through (it essentially disables VPN, AdGuard Home and other things if enabled), it will then link you to the captive portal where you can log in as you would otherwise.

    Once the internet is active, the GL.iNet router will then re-enable things like VPN and AdGuard Home.

    Since these devices are OpenWrt underneath with a pretier ui, I presume this is all possible on any OpenWrt device.

  • Is this an annoying amount of steps? And do you have to do this on every expiry of your session on the portal?