It was rather unexpected to have to pay extra for Internet access at a hotel, especially The Westin, being all expensive and whatnot.
In the end I payed out, well the company who was paying for me payed out ($15 for 24 hrs?!?!), but had I set up a few things
before getting there, there would have been no need to pay.
I stayed at
The Westin Bellevue, and
would assume that many other
Starwood Hotels and Resorts locations must employ similar captive portal filtering. At
this particular Westin location there were three wireless networks: WestinLobby, WestinMeetingRooms, WestingGuestRooms. They
all employed the same captive portal filtering based on hostnames.
Attempting to ICMP ECHO (ping)
vraidsys.com would fail, but pinging
starwoodhotels.com.vraidsys.com worked.
Similarly an HTTP GET request to
mail.zerbe.biz would fail, but
starwoodhotels.com.zerbe.biz worked. If only
I had an SSH host for tunneling with a "valid" hostname, then there would have been no need to pay for this extortion.
Want to comment or have a question? Drop me a line on
twitter: @jasonzerbe.