Fathoming airport wifi port tribbles
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So, after an afternoon of shenanigans, @royal_poet had to make a sharp exit to a certain airport in the London vicinity. Names changed to protect the guilty.
Anyhow. Airport lounge has wifi. Go into the browser, see the login screen, you get the idea. And you have to relogin every 40 minutes because they don't want people mooching off it that badly.
Then consider what might happen if, say, due to someone thinking there was a fire at one London Underground station, causing you to be rather late to your plane - more than an hour later than you planned to be at the airport, to the point you arrive at the airport minutes before your flight* so you miss it - and you might want to have a friendly voice in the digital haze to calm you down.
So there you are in the airport lounge, feeling harassed by delays and then harassed by wifi that cuts you off... except for...
They never expected the
Spanish InquisSkype invasion. Yup, airport wifi blocks you after 40 minutes for web traffic - but completely fails to give a moment of care about Skype traffic.Filed under: * and the punch line is, once you rebook, and find a hotel for the night and get settled, you catch up with your email to find a 'your plane is delayed' email letting you know your plane was an hour delayed and that in fact you would have had sufficient time to actually board it in the first place, if only the irritating bureaucrat from one of the stuffier airlines hadn't been a douche about it.
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LiveJournal is that way
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So the notion of airport wifi filtering traffic on port 80 but not whatever port(s) Skype uses is of no interest to you whatsoever?
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Handegg is on.
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Then watch handegg and come back and admire my awesome creative writing skills when you can pay it proper care and attention
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I'm also a growler into a scottish ale, no guarantees.
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Yup, airport wifi blocks you after 40 minutes for web traffic - but completely fails to give a moment of care about Skype traffic.
Hmmm. If it were troublesome and you needed to deal with it more than once, you could probably solve this with a proxy that didn't operate on port 80. Some friends did that one place I worked to get around Websense: run a proxy at home on some other port. The company can see encrypted web traffic but has no idea what it is. I bet that would work here.
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Very likely indeed. But it struck us as funny that 80 (and probably 443, didn't check) were rate limited but Skype is unblocked.
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You can Apple iMessage as well I just found. Maybe it's intentional.
</3 red eye flight
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What's the speed like? If it's decent enough you could be gaming/torrenting too
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Not just re-login. The first 45 it's free - then you need to pay for it. Unless you want to Skype and iMessage. It's interesting.
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I am now tempted to break out guildwars2 and test it - but I am borderline comatose after a night in a noisy airport hotel. It wtf there - they asked me how many devices I had and gave me a wireless key for each. Isn't that peculiar?
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As in, a slip of paper for each device, but each slip of paper contains the same key? (so, probably the WPA key)
I have been to some hotels that distribute not the WPA key but a separate authentication passcode (that you enter on a web page). Trying to connect two or more devices with the same authentication passcode (or even just authenticating with the same room details on more than one device) starts causing issues on both
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I got three different ones - but I only needed to use one of them. I thought at first too they tie it to a Mac address. Been in hotels like that, but no... Three keys but then you only need one.
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I stayed at an extended-stay place once and they basically had one-day coupons with a password. You were supposed to pay $10 a day or whatever stupid rate, but the coupons would waive the fee. Every few days I'd go to the front desk and ask for a few more; they never had a problem; maybe only people who stayed there for a couple days had to pay?
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Possible.
At this stage anything to keep me awake til I can board is a winner. Even if it's figuring out airport and hotel IT things.
Though maybe I'm trwtf here. @arantor's family is huge on FarmVille. Been doing that on the iPad for the last little bit while waiting. I am lvl 25 now.
It still awes me how much I love that man to go through all of that!!!
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LOL.
I play FV2 on Android, because it's a way of killing a few minutes here and there, and Minecraft PE's a PITA to control in comparison. I need a little BT controller.
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they asked me how many devices I had and gave me a wireless key for each. Isn't that peculiar?
I stayed at a hotel that did that the other night. Just asked for one in the end, so didn't find out if they were all really the same code or not.
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Another London airport gives you 30 minutes per day free, using your I'm sure they thought was a foolproof combo of a cookie, your email address and MAC address and email address as the filters.
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So the notion of airport wifi filtering traffic on port 80 but not whatever port(s) Skype uses is of no interest to you whatsoever?
this is pretty common actually, my phone does a similar thing. I am not allowed to use it to tether another device, only to use the internet and stream stuff directly on my phone. If I turn on the wifi hot spot feature and connect a PC to it, I'm locked out of the network until I put the phone in airplane mode and take it out again. My 3DS works absolutely fine tethered though, so I made great use of it (and plan to again) to crush inferior fools with my superior pokeymans on commutes.
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omg home safe and sound. I thought I would never make it. My luck is rotten today it seems. After all the arse - delayed flight with turbulences.
Just what this girl needs. All I want is a shower, ibuprofen and sleep. Sadly, I'm at work.
/me throws a pityparty
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If I turn on the wifi hot spot feature and connect a PC to it, I'm locked out of the network until I put the phone in airplane mode and take it out again.
That's pretty nasty. AT&T & Sprint will just tell you "oh hai your plan doesn't allow that" and turn the hotspot right back off. Then you flash Cyanogenmod or something and it starts working.
AT&T does seem to possibly use deep packet inspection, though, and may change your data plan out from under you.
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At least it isn't SLC's airport wifi, which refused to give me an IP address one late night waiting for a flight that had to be hardware swapped due to a breakdown...and worse, this was well after all the IT people had gone home for the night.
Filed under: your DHCP server sucks
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Though maybe I'm trwtf here. @arantor's family is huge on FarmVille. Been doing that on the iPad for the last little bit while waiting. I am lvl 25 now.
This is TRWTF... let me explain this to the good folks here just what level of WTF this is.
My mother and my sister play FarmVille. Both of them have multiple FB accounts so that they can have extra farms (I think my sister has two accounts and my mother three accounts)
My mother has a book of what she has planted and when it is due to be farmed so she doesn't forget.
It still awes me how much I love that man to go through all of that!!!
*blushes furiously*
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@royal_poet said:
It still awes me how much I love that man to go through all of that!!!
blushes furiously@accalia likes this.
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And you managed to get another Discourse bug, congrats
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yeah, i've known about that bug for a while. i just couldn't be bothered to fix it manually like i usually do this time...
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Fair enough
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and now i bothered to fix it.
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Im personally getting right fucking tired of public wifi without working dhcp.
I've been in hotels with more than 255 rooms where dhcp was handing out 192.168.0.x with long leases.
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well, that limit would be hit at 253 if they hand out the maximum number of addresses (256 - Network/broadcast/gateway)
of course they could be using the default configuration on the router in which case it'll only hand out ~50 leases. and most domestic routers (and a fair few commercial ones) only have enough RAM to store ~100 leases
EDIT: of course those numbers do assume a 255.255.255.0 netmask, the ranges vary if you set a different netmask
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My mother has a book of what she has planted and when it is due to be farmed so she doesn't forget.
You should write her something that keeps track of that.
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You should write her something that keeps track of that.
I could but that would be too many levels of WTF in itself.
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I could but that would be too many levels of WTF in itself.
I know! It'd probably be front-page-worthy.
I have been known to use my phone's alarm, but then I reminded myself it's just a game.
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You realise I'd write it in PHP as well, right?
But last I checked, TDWTF wasn't CodingConfessional...
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You realise I'd write it in PHP as well, right?
Of course. That was going to be one of the layers.
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Of course. That was going to be one of the layers.
What's really funny is that she probably wouldn't use it because the act of writing is also symbolic in itself.
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the act of writing is also symbolic in itself.
That's probably the REAL TRWTF. What is
it(must be extra clear) that specific writing symbolic of, given the context that it's a list of times when her crops are done?
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Fucked if I know. I just know that she does it pretty ritualistically and has done now for some years.
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Aww, come on, live a little. Ask! (There was a character in Catch 22 who decided that time appears to slow down when you're bored, so his subjective life would be extended if he spent as much time as possible being as bored as possible. I'm just trying to help you live longer.)
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So I probably should've said "live a lot."
:)
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Aww, come on, live a little. Ask! (There was a character in Catch 22 who decided that time appears to slow down when you're bored, so his subjective life would be extended if he spent as much time as possible being as bored as possible. I'm just trying to help you live longer.)
The amount of time I could burn on such a thing would be insane... and would live up to my self-description of being TRWTF and I'm trying very hard not to be so.
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would live up to my self-description of being TRWTF
How is "it's not in my idiom" not already a macro that would show up in the top of a GIS
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Maybe a good idea for OMGWTF3?
Paging @apapadimoulis
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So the notion of airport wifi filtering traffic on port 80 but not whatever port(s) Skype uses is of no interest to you whatsoever?
I'm frankly amazed that the airport wifi was decent enough to support using skype.
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we do use it for IM purposes a lot of the time, rather than calls.
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I was trying to remember if we managed to get enough bandwidth for voice though, I think we did after a fashion. I seem to recall hotel wifi was suckier about that though.
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hotel wifi was evil satan spawn.
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we do use it for IM purposes a lot of the time, rather than calls.
Ah, that makes sense then. I've never really used it, and it only occurs to me that it's a voice thing.