Can't successfully connect to Marriott Hotels as repeater

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.

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