Well now you have me wondering if there isn’t something ‘just not quite right’ going on with the upstream Wi-Fi & the GL device. Can you do a site scan from a ‘known good’ connected device to the ship’s Wi-Fi? Eg:
Not sure if this is what you wanted to see… Survey feature is not included in the free version of Netspot
So, presuming it is the right one for the hotspot/captive portal, the only BSSID with anything close to approp. SNR’s ‘Mode’ is reporting AC but uses the 2.4GHz band, Channel 11 (YMMV but I consider -70 dB to be about 50% signal quality).
Your screen shot is better than nothing but I’d expect anything truly Wi-Fi AC (aka Wi-Fi 5) to be above Channel 12 (eg: Ch 36, 56, 149, 162, etc.) comparing the survey of my neighbourhood via the afore-linked Wifi Analyzer. It shows the specific frequencies/SSID used (see its screenshots). I’m not how much of that would apply to Enterprise-class gear as found from Aruba Networks.
IDK; at this point I’d try to improve the quality of the signal for both SSIDs. That apparent ‘AC on 2.4G’ has me disconcerted, though.
EDIT: Yeah, those ‘Wi-Fi Modes’ of the second screenshot lead me to want to ensure I match as many of those specs for the Repeater’s 2.4 GHz radio.
Maybe we are talking about different things here… I am not trying to improve the signal quality. Just trying to connect more than one device I paid for 
The router seems to connect to the ship wifi and can reach the gateway and what not just perfectly. The problem is that the traffic does not go anywhere, like something is blocking it. So I am wondering how to make the ship wifi believe my router is my laptop that is a “good” mac.
Yeah I get what you’re trying to set up but I was somewhat thinking the signal quality might be at play.
That should (ideally) just be a matter of a MAC Clone but you report that didn’t avail the issue. You also said DNS & VPN isn’t in play so I’m really not sure how much more I could personally offer for help.
Do you have a length of Ethernet to attempt Ship WLWAN → Repeater → LAN → Laptop?
Beyond that, all I got is & it may not even be related:
Unfortunately I do not have a cable with me.
Well this states cloning the MAC solves all issues, but that is not working for me. Of course I have a lot less time and budget for this little project than the whole cruiseline company, but the solution must be something stupidly simple…
It probably is but it seems I’m either too stupid or simple to further assist. I’ll bow out here.
Thanks for your help dude! Maybe I should really forget it and enjoy the holiday
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Enjoy your time on the boat.
Here is my thought::
The MAC Address of the access point of the boat is Aruba enterprise.
Companies are using software like Clearpass that can block mac address switching. It’s becoming harder to use portable routers.
The cloned MAC address needs to also match the IP address as well, try cloning both IP and MAC. BUT that still might not work as it also checks other items like OS, etc of the device. So if you have a windows machine, then the same MAC is used for a Linux machine, it won’t work as the profile is a mismatch.
So please enjoy your trip instead
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I was recently camping on a farm and faced a similar problem with trying to use the Beryl AX as a repeater with no amount of MAC cloning, DNS changes…etc working at all and I could not believe that their system would have been sophisticated enough to block the router in the way you have described. Furthermore, trying a different make worked straight away and with no fuss at all leading me to the conclusion that there is undoubtedly an inherent issue with the GL.iNET’s abilities to repeat WiFi and/or deal with captive portal.
Yep; I may well be quite simple (note to self: read the damn logs!). Perhaps it’s a matter of disabling (ideally just adjusting the timeouts of) Multi-WAN tracking as the Repeater appears to handshake to the WLWAN but then drops connectivity some 13 seconds later:
Sun Apr 9 13:39:05 2023 daemon.notice hostapd: EAPOL-4WAY-HS-COMPLETED 60:57:18:c0:66:79
Sun Apr 9 13:39:08 2023 daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[1]: DHCPREQUEST(br-lan) 192.168.8.218 60:57:18:c0:66:79
Sun Apr 9 13:39:08 2023 daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[1]: DHCPACK(br-lan) 192.168.8.218 60:57:18:c0:66:79 LAPTOP-NAME-REDACTED
Sun Apr 9 13:39:21 2023 user.notice mwan3[9210]: Execute ifdown event on interface wwan (wlan-sta0)
GL GUI → Network → Multi-WAN → Interface Status Tracking Method → Repeater → [gear icon(s)]
(I swear I’m bowing out now!)
What was the other make?
Good find, I skimmed the logs myself. I didn’t notice the mwan3. I don’t think that multi wan is enabled by default out of the box, is it?
It is enabled OOTB on my Slate AX, f/w 4.2.3; I only changed the tracking IPs. I couldn’t imagine it not being also active w/ Repeater mode. I’ve had one or two strange little ‘gotcha’s’ that seem to be related to multi-hop latency when different GL devices are behind other routers in my LAN.
ps -w | grep mwan
4551 root 1388 S /bin/sh /usr/sbin/mwan3rtmon
22157 root 1308 S /bin/sh /usr/sbin/mwan3track wan eth0 online 192.168.1.111 9.9.9.9 149.112.112.112
Tried that and this time the browser got redirected to the captive portal, then timed out. That does not happen when connecting the laptop directly, after the very first time registering the laptop every next time it just connects without the captive page. So I am pretty sure MAC spoofing is not enough and they are using whatever fingerprinting abilities of the Aruba devices. I will probably drop the attempts now, it obviously requires more than a cheap device and unprepared user to get in. Thanks for all the help anyway!
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It’s been getting difficult to have hotspot at hotels, cruise ships, planes etc. Companies are catching on and they are losing revenue if they don’t do something.
Bought this one at the time and worked straight away:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08Y5YB5D1
I would have thought that these sites would also block TP-LINK routers first as they are undoubtedly much more prevalent and popular than GL.iNET as travel routers.
Haha, that manual IP trick did work! I guess you cannot go stupider and simpler than that! Thanks everyone for your help, this is a great community!
Added: One thing worth mentioning, I had to reboot the device and set it to use a 5Ghz network manually, it did not work with automatic 2.4Ghz.
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