when last we saw our hero (Sunday, Aug 31, 2003),
Joel Wickard was madly tapping out:
> I just thought I'd throw this up on the list. If anyone plans on taking a
> trip someplace and booking a room at country inn & suites... don't do it
> for the internet connection. ( I tried to get a room at a couple other
> hotels, but this place was the only one that had vacancies in the area. )
> I was glad to see that there was ethernet in the room when I got here, and
> even happier that the office had ethernet cables at the front desk for
> people who forgot to bring thier own ( I feel like such a rookie ) What I
> haven't been enjoying is having to login through their website every 24
> hours to reactivate the ability for my room to hit the internet ( I only
> had to do this once at a hyatt regency ) Also the hotels "high speed"
> internet access provided by GlobalNet literally flies at the super sonic
> speed of slow. It takes a good 15 seconds for a page to load and I
> started a download of a pdf catalog and was getting a mind blowing 2.5kbps
> for speed. But best of all, ( the straw that boke the camels back and
> made me write this ) I decided to hit slashdot to check up on things, and
> was redirected to the country inn website with a page that said the site
> was unavailable. I tried opening a new browser session.. same thing. I
> thought maybe the page was really down, so I logged into my home computer
> and tried to fire it up... resolved perfectly... bastards.. Thank god I
> leave tomorrow morning.
with broadband in the hotel room you pays your money and you takes
your chances ... caveat emptor.
i spend an unhealthy amount of time on the road for work and i've
interacted with tons of these portal based broadband access systems.
by way of an FYI - country inn & suites uses wayport for broadband
service delivery as well and in many of their hotels they have
wireless support in the commons areas. (which is boingo-able btw) so
i don't know that pointing the finger specifically at ci&s is
necessarily warranted. ;-)
all hotel bband systems are a compromise (which means they screw
pretty much everybody equally). you're going to find the 24 hour
login pretty much everywhere. it provides a nice way for the hotel to
cleanly integrate everything into the billing system. apparently, in
the hotel business clean billing is everything.
portal based systems are a royal PITA no matter what you do and the
particularly broken ones (which ironically always seem to have an old
kernel rev linux tcp behavior sig) will punt you if they don't see
traffic sourced for TCP:80 on a pretty regular basis.
some tips from a guy who does this *a lot* from all over the world.
1 - tunnel everything - i don't trust anyone and i certainly don't
trust the local nerd at the hotel i'm staying to not sniff the
traffic coming from my room to harvest passwords for sites, IM,
etc.
1a - when using ipsec make sure that you've got a client (and server)
that support tunneling over udp. lots of these portal systems
are nat'd to the outside world and hence they seem to break a
lot of less clueful ipsec clients/concentrators. nortel
contivity suckers seem to be particularly hard bitten by this
crap.
1b - failing ipsec ... learn to use and love ssh tunneling. which
also means learning how to use the proxy functionality in your
favorite web browser. what? your browser doesn't support proxy
autoconfig files? sucks to be you ...
2 - feed the portal troll - if you're ssh tunneling everything
(including web traffic) you're not going to trigger the counters
that indicate an active connection on some systems. keep these
suckers happy by periodically fetching something
w/(wget|fetch|your_cli_http_client_of_choice) every couple of
minutes should be sufficient to keep most of these things happy
and prevent them from punting your connection.
note: do this externally of the proxy mechanisms you're using to
tunnel the rest of your traffic.
if you're ipsec tunneling and you can't run your client in split
tunnel mode you can expect some interesting punts here.
3 - avoid UDP based applications - these don't tunnel nicely
4 - work in batches - suck your mail down locally, read, compose, etc
and send it in batches. you won't feel so bad when that long-ass
email you've been working on disappears because the connection
crapped out...
5 - learn to use and love screen - if you must work interactively over
the connection. screen will save you tons of cursing (no pun
intended) when the connection gets horked. you simply re-establish
your connection and screen -R - voila, you're back where you were.
6 - a plug for ssh here, ssh -X -C makes a remarkable difference in
remote X display.
--
steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org
PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC
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