Interface for Hotel WiFi Login

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    Unfortunately the standard text based browser does not work for logging in to most hotel WiFi systems that I encounter. A better browser or an even simpler interface would be greatly appreciated.

    Regards

  • Go to Best Answer
    • Official Post

    LibreELEC was never designed for hotel lounges or other public wifi places.
    It is a Home Theatre PC application, not a Hotel Theatre PC application.
    So the connections setup page is not likely to change anytime soon.

    Sorry.

    Quote from chewitt

    My suggestion is to connect the CuBox via Ethernet and enable the wireless AP feature in LE settings. Now connect your phone to the AP and complete the Hotel's WiFi registration process; the Hotel should see it coming from the Ethernet MAC, and then you're done.

    I have spent some great December days in the sunny Canary Islands with mild equatorial temperatures, and I took a CE client device which connects to my LE server, and I did not think of the alternative of booting the device with android only for the Hotel's WiFi registration process.

    I ask for your opinion: Sometimes there is no ethernet connection in hotels, if the LE device supports another operating system (android, windows, linux, ...) to be used in the Hotel's WiFi registration process using the same hardware and the same MAC Wi-Fi, my question is: do you think that once registered with android or another operating system it will work well with LE?

    Edited 2 times, last by elonesna (December 18, 2021 at 9:36 PM).

    • Best Answer

    elonesna As long as the MAC address doesn't change flipping between Android and LE should work. The other option which I sometimes use in hotels is Ethernet tethering. LE exposes a wifi hotspot/tether in the GUI, but if you create /storage/.config/connman_main.conf from /etc/connman/main.conf and allow ethernet tethering you can connect a laptop to the Ethernet port on the box, which allows the laptop to share the boxes WiFi connection and complete any kind of registration process needed to get the LE box online. The only fiddly part is, you probably need to SSH into the box over WiFi to set the tether, and this is not always allowed, or (easier, if the device is an SBC) have a UART cable to get a local serial console. These days I'm travelling with a Radxa Zero in a flirc Pi Zero case which is both tiny, fast, and has GPIO pins exposed so I can run the board from the +5V on the UART cable and access the UART console easily.

    I connect a phone (an old phone) to the hotel hotspot and use a usb cable to connect it the the libreelec box. I enable LibreELEC's hotspot feature and use that as my wifi hotspot. Only one device connected directly to the hotel network. Worked fine for me.

    Hope that helps.

    Cheers,

    LongMan

    When I travel my Pi4 travels with me. It's my mobile living room basically. All my media is on private cloud storage so I can watch all my stuff and that includes live IPTV anywhere with a mildly decent connection.

    What I do to get the Pi4 connected is I spoof the Pi4's MAC address on my laptop. Then I go through the process of logging in on the laptop. When that's done I switch off wifi on the laptop and immediately turn on the wifi on the Pi4 and it works.

    Then I connect the laptop again with a different wifi profile without a spoofed Mac address, login again and then both devices are connected.

    When I really want to be nerdy I also bring a spare dual band wifi router with DDWRT with me that I use to connect to the hotel wifi. I use the 2.4 GHz band to connect with the hotel wifi and then use the 5 GHz band as my own internal wifi network. There's NAT routing between both bands. The hotel sees the router's mac address meaning I can login with my laptop which effectively connects all devices at once. As a nice bonus it ensures optimal wifi reception for all devices which hotel wifi doesn't always do.

    I've recently pushed a change to LE master branch which enables (allows) Ethernet tethering in ConnMan. It works the same as WiFi tethering but in reverse (share the WiFi connection over Ethernet). This makes it fairly simple to connect the LE device to Hotel WiFI and then connect a laptop (behind a NAT connection) to negotiate the logon process. Next step is to make changes to the LE settings app to support the current Hotspot being rebranced as connection sharing and to support switching between WiFi and Ethernet. I suck at Python and have low time right now so that might take a year or two.

    Nice. Perhaps even better if it were possible to use the wifi as a repeater. Android does the same nowadays. When wifi and hotspot are both enabled the hotspot retransmits the wifi connection of the phone with the access point. I'm guessing that happens on the same channel. Many laptops don't have LAN ports anymore and a repeat option would work around the problem. It would then also work with a phone or tablet.