Can't successfully connect to Marriott Hotels as repeater

Technical Support for Routers
1

I continually struggle to setup a repeater network at Marriott hotels. I have tried cloning my laptop mac address, changing the DNS, resetting everything multiple times. Anyone have any surefire strategies for Marriot or other hotels? Thanks.

2

Funny you should mention that. I was in a Marriott last week and could not get my AR300M to work. I finally gave up.

 

This week I’ve stayed in two different Hilton properties and it’s working great. I’ve got it connecting to my openvpn server at home and after running some speed tests there is no difference between the performance between direct connecting my computer to the hotel network or going through the AR300M with openvpn running.

3

That’s strange, I mostly stay at Marriott hotels and I use mine all the time without issue. I’m actually at a Marriott right now connected to the “Marriott_GUEST” SSID through my 300M.

Have you tried hardwiring it to the Ethernet port in room?

4

Are any of you having issues with the captive portals?

I frequent a Hampton Inn (Hilton Property). I keep an icon to the portal on my desktop and launch it after I connect to the Hotel’s wifi as the popup rarely occurs. I have no issue logging in, but seem to get short lease times that vary from minutes to hours.

5

I’m in a Courtyard right now and just had the same problem… but I did find a work-around that involves adding a host table entry into the advanced settings (have to remember to delete it when I’m done). Sorry I can’t explain this more briefly.

Here’s what was happening:

  • After the easy, normal way failed, tried logging into the captive portal while connected directly in Windows, then cloning the MAC addresses in the GL-AR750 router.
  • when laptop is connected through the GL-AR750 everything still fails – should work though because MAC address is the same as far as Hotel’s gateway is concerned, right? but it fails.
  • notice that addresses are being passed to the gateway (some kind of proxying scheme?) and failing because instead of the hotel’s gateway using IP address, they’re using a FQDN for the hotel’s gateway address. To be clear, let’s say the code for my hotel is ‘foo’, the FQDN looks like this:

foo.cust.blueprintrf.com

  • it seems that the DNS server isn’t converting that address to the actual hotel router gateway address (on purpose maybe?).

So here’s the fix:

  • connect directly to hotels captive portal again, open CMD window, ping foo.cust.blueprintrf.com and find it’s IP address. Turns out it is actually just the gateway IP address for the Hotel’s LAN.

  • Go into GL-AR750’s advanced settings

  • Network->Hostnames->Add

  • add an entry for

foo.cust.blueprintrf.com with IP address of the default gateway.

Voila, now everything works… just have to remember to delete that Hostname entry when I leave, or it will mess me up next time I visit another property that uses this same captive portal service.

HTH and sorry I can’t write this in a shorter way ATM.

  • DRC
6

Thank you for sharing. Excuse my ignorance but how does one discover the FQDN (foo.cust.blueprintrf.com)? Is it the URL that appears in the browser when you try to connect?

7

Shouldn’t disable DNS rebind protection solves the problem?

8

Huh. I’ve recently had an issue with a captive portal on my Slate (AR-750S captive portal issues) and I wish I’d thought about this, it probably would have fixed my issue. I’ll be sure to try it the next time I have problems with a captive portal page.

@alzhao: DNS Rebind issue didn’t solve my issue. What MIGHT be a fix to try (and I’m willing to test) is where once you’ve detected a captive portal:

  • use the original DNS server(s) from the WAN side to get the IP address of the captive portal page
  • manually set an ephemeral (temporary, and goes away after a reboot or network-type change) entry in the hosts file mapping that IP address to the the captive-portal’s FQDN.
9

In my case, I run Linux on my laptop and I’d used "dig @<hotel's default route> <name of captive portal page>" to discover mine.

10

I think this is the correct way. We noticed this issue but need time to implement.

11

FWIW, since my braino a few weeks ago, I’ve been in 3 more hotels and have had no issues with my Slate and captive portals in either “WiFi Repeater/Router” or “Wired Router” modes.

1 Like
12

@kennethrc Sorry, but can you give a newbie-friendly instructions of how you did this?

How do you discover the captive portal address?

How do you discover the original WAN side DNS servers?

How do you map the IP address? How to do this ephemerally?

1 Like
13

Thank you! I am at a Mariott Residence Inn right now and encountered this same issue. Adding the hostname pointing to the default gateway in the advanced settings allowed me to get this all working. Never had an issue at Marriott hotels until this one. But this is a newer hotel, so maybe they have updated technology.

For those asking about how to receive the captive portal - here is how I did it. First connected to the Mariott wifi with my phone and was able to get registered. Next, I setup my router to connect to the hotel wifi and did a mac clone to my phones MAC address. Then when I connected the phone to the router, I got a wifi notification message on my phone that I needed to log in to the network. When I clicked on that notification, it took me to a chrome error page saying it couldn’t resolve the address. The error message contained the capitve portal address of: mspwb2.cust.blueprintrf.com, so I plugged that in to the hostnames and it worked.

14

I struggled with this as well. It works fine with my Hootoo Router (that thing connects to anything!).

Anyway the GL.iNet admin panel showed the DNS server for the Marriott Network (TOWNEPLACE_GUEST in this instance). I put that DNS into my Mac’s DNS setttings and it was able to load the blueprintrf.com screen. That part wasn’t working before I tweaked the DNS.

Now the Wifi works.

Hope that helps some other folks.

15

The instructions here are very unclear about what needs to be done. Burt whatever I have deciphered from here and tried simply doesn’t work. Tried using both cable a wireless repeater.

This is exactly why I bought the AR300. As it doesn’t work I will need to return it.

16

Sods law. I have, after a nights sleep and several more hours, managed to do this. The instructions from the above, after picking through what people actually mean (when you’re giving instructions on how to do something, please be very clear!) are what you need to do.

Note you need to do these steps all from the same laptop and BEFORE you connect to the Marriot’s WiFi. This is really important (happy to be proven wrong on having to do it before you connect - when I tried to do it after I connected it just didn’t work). Note I also had to factory reset my GL.iNet - I highly doubt you will but I had played around with it and wanted to start from a clean slate. But just bear that in mind.

I’d also suggest you reboot your GL.iNet and disconnect all other WiFi devices (both of these shouldn’t be necessary but just in case lets do that). Finally I also have no Custom DNS Server settings configured (in the menu go to ‘More Settings’ → ‘Custom DNS Server’ and make sure all of the settings are turned off). Again I don’t know if this is required.

  1. From your laptop, connect to the GL.iNet admin panel.

  2. Go to ‘More Settings’ → ‘MAC Clone’ in the menu.

  3. From the drop down list in the MAC Clone screen, select the MAC address that is shown as (clone). Click ‘Apply’.

  4. In the menu, click ‘Internet’. Then, in the box with ‘Repeater’, click ‘Scan’.

  5. When the scan is complete select the SSID you want to connect to (for example, mine was TOWNEPLACE_GUEST) from the drop down menu and click ‘Join’.

  6. In the menu, click ‘Internet’ again and refresh the page until you see the TOWNEPLACE_GUEST (or whatever yours is called) connected and with an IP address. Make a note of the IP address that is listed for ‘Gateway’ as we will need it later.

  7. I am using Firefox so when this happened I got a ‘You must login to your network connection’ (or something similar pop-up). Click that button and you will see the WiFi sign in page pop-up. It will fail to load, but that’s fine. If you don’t get that pop-up then people have said above you can try to browse to cnn.com or neverssl.com - the point is you need to get the WiFi signin page to appear, and fail to load.

  8. Once you get the WiFi page failing to load you will see, in the address bar of that page, something similar to https://mcita.cust.blueprintrf.com:8001 - the bit we need for this is after the // and before the : - so mcita.cust.blueprintrf.com in our case. Make a note of it.

  9. Go back to the GL.iNet admin console and on the menu click ‘More Settings’ → ‘Advanced’. Login when prompted (username is root and the password is the same one you use to login to the GL.iNet admin console).

  10. When logged in, from the top menu click ‘Network’ → ‘Hostnames’. Click the Add button. In the first box, under ‘Hostname’ enter the name we made a note of in step 8 above (ours was mcita.cust.blueprintrf.com). In the second box under IP address select the IP address that we noted for the Gateway in step 6 above (it will likely end in .1). Click ‘Save & Apply’. Wait for around 30 seconds. This might not be necessary but lets just do it to make sure it applies properly.

  11. Go back to the WiFi login page that failed at step 7 and refresh it. Two things will happen here - the page will either load and you can then login to the WiFi, or it will fail to load again in which case wait 30 seconds and try again. If it fails to load on the second or third attempt my suggestion would be to reboot the GL.iNet and then go back through these steps again. If this still doesn’t work then there are lots of things you can try but there are too many options to give them here.

  12. If you have other devices attached to your GL.iNet then I found I had to disconnect and reconnect them again to the GL.iNet WiFi for them to then have internet connectivity.

I hope this helps others. As I start to get more confident and try this out more I may find some of the steps are actually not needed. This worked for me just now. I currently have 4 devices connected to it (2 Windows laptops, 1 Android tablet, 1 Android watch and 1 Android phone) and they are all getting internet.

1 Like
17

thanks for sharing.

Next time I will definitely find a Marriott hotel to try.

18

I created a blog post out of this at WiFi Captive Portals Making It Difficult To Connect Your Travel Router? - pauby.com - bit more info and structure to it.

19

I’ve also found Marriott a pain to connect to. Takes some playing to get things working but I usually can make it happen.

They also like to lock out the HDMI ports on the TV’s :rage: I travel with a 750S and Firestick 4k. They make both a pain to use!

20

This is very bad. Why should they do this? Maybe they need to add in their online booking system: TV HDMI blocked.