Hilton hotel: can’t connect

[rickeames]

Just checked into our hotel and I can’t get it connected. I have tried cloning the phone Mac ID and still no joy. I got this for this trip specifically and it worked fine at home. It has to be the captive page but if I am spoofing the MAC shouldn’t it just work?

[bring.fringe18]

So you can’t connect via your phone, authenticate, surf then clone the MAC to your GL device?

Captive Portal Strategies

I’ve had problems with captive portals, particularly with my Chromebooks (looking at you Delta), and I see others have had, so I thought I would put down a few notes in case it would be helpful. Some captive portals operate through a form of DNS poisoning. When you make a connection to a wifi router, you get an IP and a DNS server. Mobile devices, most modern OSs and browsers will immediately run a captive portal detection test by issuing a DNS request through port 80 for some identified serve…

[rickeames]

It didn’t work. Even with my MAC ID showing under clone. I’m stuck, and frustrated.

[elorimer]

Without repeating them, did you try the other ideas?

[lizh]

Is it possible to relay successfully, but no network?

[rickeames]

Not sure what you mean. Here is what I did.

Logged in with phone to hotel network and got authenticated after the captive page.

I copied down the MAC address, the assigned IP and dns and then switched to my router and input all of those as a static MAC, static ip with fields matching the iPhone. It will initially show as “online” and then flickers out to offline. I’m never able to load a page or anything.

I don’t know how to debug this. If it’s pretending to be the iPhone, how can they be blocked?

[rickeames]

I did. I’m out of things to copy from the iPhone to the router to pretend.

[rickeames]

Update: as a last ditch effort, I cloned my iPad instead of the phone and lo and behold, it worked

[PAX]

Glad it worked

If I were you, my brain would switch to overload trying to figure out why it didn’t work with the iPhone clone
I’d love to hear any theories from the community here.

[bring.fringe18]

Apple gonna Apple. /s

[lecmipahu]

Puzzling, but it’s good that it works. Do you have, by any chance, enabled “Private Wi-Fi address” in ship wifi settings (the “i” button)? Could you compare that between your iPad na iPhone?

[rickeames]

I did. What worked for me:

• iPad was initially set to private address when i authenticated to the hotel system.

• I wrote down the private MAC that it was using and then turned off private.

• I took that written down MAC and put that as the MAC for the router

Everything then worked.

[elorimer]

Interesting. So, just the MAC, and not the IP/DNS/default gateway.

I spent a couple of hours this morning diving into the captive portal offerings, and it seems clear to me the cruise ships/resorts have spent the covid downtime installing clever stuff. The advertising for these clever bits (“increase cross-selling”, “maximize revenue opportunities”) is pretty clear.

Also: my entire approach to digital life, to be entirely in the cloud, is half completely wrong and half completely right.

[bring.fringe18]

@elorimer

Also: my entire approach to digital life, to be entirely in the cloud, is half completely wrong and half completely right.

(Oh, how I feel this pain.)

Also, related:

[Feature Request] Cloning a MAC is not enough, we need IP & Profile Cloning

So there have been a few posts this week about MAC cloning not working. The solution seems to be that cloning the MAC is not enough. Companies are using sophisticated software to create profiles per device to prevent MAC spoofing. That said, when cloning the MAC, you will also need to clone the IP address of your device to your router. The request is, on the MAC cloning page, we also need a input field for the IP address,gateway,DNS.

[classicmac]

I ran in to this issue today at a Hampton Inn. Somehow the wireless network was blocking my travel router.

To get around this I cloned the MAC of my computer. What I initially failed to realize was that by default my computer was using a "private rotating MAC address." Basically that means it is using a different MAC address when connecting to the "Hilton Honors" SSID than it uses to connect to my travel router SSID.

To get around this I manually specified the MAC address in the router GUI that was being used for the Hilton Honors SSID. If you are on a Mac computer the other work around would be disabling "Private Wi-Fi Address" in the WiFi SSID settings. You would need to do this for both SSIDs if you are going to do a MAC clone from the router GUI.