DSL in condos and hotels

[imesg]

This may not be Gentoo specific but I use Gentoo so I will pose this here.

I recently was at a condominium which offered free DSL. The DSL box was a Cisco 575 LRE. So I set eth0 to use dhcp and started eth0. Nothing happened except a message to the effect that eth0 could not be started.

I got in touch with the provider for the condominium. He didn't know anything about Linux but suggested that I set the ethernet port like this:

iface_eth0="192.168.50.10 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 "

which I did. After I started net.eth0 I started a browser and entered a URL ( I do not think that the specific URL matters, just that you enter one). I got the providers web page which asked If I accepted the terms of use and then a page which notified that it was looking for me. Which I think it was looking for my MAC address and after that it worked like a charm with the IPs I set. Also after that I could reconfigure to use dhcp and that would work also. So I turned it off over night and had to repeat the same process.

I was recently in a hotel in Rome Italy and they had an ethernet jack in my room which I plugged into and set dhcp on eth0 and got a routing table but could not get anywhere. I suspect that if I had tried any URL in a browser it would have worked the same as described above.

My questions are:

1. Why doesn't the dhcp setup work out of the box?

2. How can I get the dhcp to work the first time?

3. Does anyone know of a similar service which I have described and what exactly is the process which is used here?

Thanks,

Gene Imes

[cuban]

Yes. I've travelled for business and Marriot hotels are like this. I could get an IP but I couldn't get anywhere on the internet until I opened the browser. The first page it brought me to was the hotel's page talking about their broadband.

After that I was able to do anything I needed to, until I unplugged my cable. Then I had to go through the process again.

I'm guessing they have some sort of proxy [EDIT: I don't mean web proxy, I mean the word proxy in it's true sense] that doesn't permit you access until you view this page...

As far as how to fix it... I have no idea. I was just at a hotel so it wasn't a big deal to me. I just wanted to comment on how I'd seen it before and it sparked my curiosity.

Daniel
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