hotel wifi redirect to landing issue

[fusion22]

Hello,

I'm writing this so maybe someone can help guide me on an issue I have with a sales rep laptop.

1) He can connect to the sonicwall router at work using the guest ssid.
2) He can connect at home using his Apple router e without an issue (We did a logmein session so I know it worked). Not sure which Apple router he has but I believe it is the larger one.
3) When he goes to a hotel, he sees the network, he connects. But the fun starts here. He opens up Internet Explorer he immediately gets page not found. However, if he attempts to open another webpage such as yahoo.com it then redirects to the landing page of the hotel and he then can connect without a problem.

I did email him with some snipped windows and told him to be sure automatic detect settings is off as well as make sure proxy is unchecked. Also make sure that DNS is set to auto and automatic IP under the wireless network card properties. Is this uncommon or is there any kind of solution?

 

[mammador]

What is his homepage set to?

It may be the hotel has blocked that page/site.

 

[fusion22]

When I set it up, it loads two home pages. The 1st is a webpage that is encrypted webpage that starts with an https://www.site.com address. The other is our company home page which resolves to it's actual site url. for ex: http://www.site.com loads our comany site http://www.2site.com. It just redirects to the actual webpage.

I am thinking I can take the secure https:// site out of the page that loads first or reverse the way it loads the pages.

These load fine at our work guest connection and at the reps home connection but hotels done seem to like it. It has avast free on it until we decide to start to decide which paid to get. Though we have another user who has the same computer and her has no issue.

 

[drebo]

It's likely that the hotel's redirect is based on DNS and if his homepage is an IP address, that'd be your issue.

Could be any number of other things, as well, but you don't give nearly enough detail.

Does it happen at every hotel or just one particular hotel?

Have you run wireshark to determine the requests that laptop is actually making?

Is there supposed to be a VPN involved?

Again, there's lots of stuff going on here and with the info presented, there's no way to know.

 

[fusion22]

neither of the home pages are an IP address. I thought my prevoius post would show up but it has not.

Anyway, what my post had mentioned was there are two home pages that loads in in Internet Explorer when he launches it.

One is a online version of the software that we use at work which sales rep have access to which they can receive the same information as we can in the office. That webpage starts with an https:// web site. The tab beside that is our company name all spelled out ubt it changes to the actual name of the page. You can ping either DNS URL and they both load to the same IP.

So none of the home pages that load is an IP address. They both have a valid url.

They do not use VPN.

Yes it has happened at both hotels but I"m not sure if they both use attwifi. I have read that if a hotel uses wayport access that this type of thing can happen. And the only solution so far is to enter a url if you get page not found which then picks up to their Accept page.


This is a quote from flyertalk.com: "Of course in hotels with Wayport, you need to open your web browser and go to a public site like yahoo.com (or flyertalk ;-) to get the log in page where you can accept terms of service, enter your room number, or credit card number depending on the hotel. If your home page is set to an intranet site, your web browser will come up with a page not found message and you will never get access to the internet." - http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/archive/t-454378.html

It sounds exactly what is happening to him.

The only possible explaination or fix that I know of is to possibly either to not load the https site first before the other page, or just take it out completely and load just one normal webpage that does not have https involved. Since it does to go to yahoo.com fine after IE is opened with a page not found by putting in yahoo.com, it should load our company webpage as it is just a public as yahoo is.

 

[CA19100]

If he wants to leave his bookmarks alone, he could just use a different web browser solely for logging into the hotel, then launch IE when he's online.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've had this issue when logging in to public ATT wifi (wayport). When I open my browser, it opens to AT forums, but then I have to open some more pages until the landing page comes up (if it ever does, sometimes it doesn't).

 

[fusion22]

Thanks VL,

How is it when you connect to other wifi's? Espeically to hotels that don't use attwifi or wayport does it do the same thing or do those come straight up?

 

[fusion22]

I am also curious. I have another Dell latitude E6420 like the one that had the page cannot be diplayed issue. I checked the driver and it seems to be a 2 year old driver. I noticed that dell has an recent driver as of 6/14/2012. I'm going to test this but I am curious if this a driver related issue.

 

[fusion22]

I used the second E6420 laptop I just got from Dell and took and sat outside best western. Though I did not have the access code, I didn't need it. I connected to their wifi, and opened IE. I have the same Antivirus and webpages loading as the other laptop BTW. It again opened out company page but not the other one. so I entered in yahoo.com and sure enough it redirected to the best western wifi landing page. I repeated the process with the same thing happening everytime.

Then I intstalled the already downloaded A02 driver fropm work which is dated 6/4/2012. Installed it and now when I open IE it immediately opens the landing page as it should waiting for a access code.

I hope this helps others.

 

[zermenoj]

I have a user that when he gets to his hotel, he gets to their landing page, however the following day he's unable to get back to that landing page. He's able to access the Internet, so that's not his issue...any suggestions?