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Dennis
Asked: 2014-03-11 05:17:45 +0800 CST

What do I need to do to connect to public wifi in a local shop?

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I go into a local coffee shop with public wifi and try to connect. The connection shows up in network manager so I click on it and it says it is connected. Apparently the next thing I should do is open a browser and accept the acceptable use policy. However when I open Firefox it just shows the start page which I'm assuming is local and if I try to go anyplace on the internet says "connecting" and never goes anyplace. How am I supposed to get to the "Acceptable Use" page?

The network manager is set to Automatic for everthing and when I sit down and click connect on the indicator icon, after it says connected, it appears to be ready to go. If I edit things in the connection properties that I know will cause it to fail the browser shows the "server not found" page when I try to access the internet, but if I leave everthing set to automatic and get the connection shown below it just freezes at "connecting".

I have tried firefox and chromium and they both act the same, but could there be something in the way I have my browsers configured that aren't allowing them to re-direct to the "acceptable use" page? Are there other tools that might help diagnose what is going on?

State: connected (global)

- Device: wlan0  [TimHortons-US-Staging] ---------------------------------------
  Type:              802.11 WiFi
  Driver:            iwl3945
  State:             connected
  Default:           yes
  HW Address:        <MAC address removed>

  Capabilities:
    Speed:           54 Mb/s

  Wireless Properties
    WEP Encryption:  yes
    WPA Encryption:  yes
    WPA2 Encryption: yes

  Wireless Access Points (* = current AP)
    *TimHortons-US-Staging: Infra, <MAC address removed>, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 67

  IPv4 Settings:
    Address:         10.2.242.244
    Prefix:          16 (255.255.0.0)
    Gateway:         10.2.1.1

    DNS:             208.67.222.222
    DNS:             208.67.220.220
wireless

1 Answers

  1. I had a similar problem, and found that I could make a curl request just fine:

    $ curl -vL "https://www.google.com"
* Rebuilt URL to: https://www.google.com/
*   Trying 172.217.19.196...

    When I connected directly to that IP in chrome(ium), I got shown the guard page, and could tick the necessary box. YMMV.

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