RT-AC68U as repeater at hotel

[Jay Klinger]

Hey all, so I'm at an extended stay that wants to charge weekly per device for internet, which is pretty lame. I have my RT-AC68U with me, and I tried to set it up as a repeater. It worked somewhat, but it keeps bringing me to the sign in screen of the hotel where you input a code, and then works again for a minute or two and back to the same screen. Any ideas?

 

[L&LD]

Would you have better luck with an Ethernet connection? Do they offer that?

 

[Zonkd]

TLDR you may be out of luck, you may need a router that can do NAT while repeating a wireless signal. The ASUS can’t.

In full: unfortunately the ASUS repeater mode disables firewall, ip sharing and network address translation (NAT) which is required to create a private LAN for yourself to connect all your devices and let them share the hotel wifi connection.

If you don’t own a travel router you could ask the hotel whether you can pay for an Ethernet port in your room and plug the router into that and use it in normal router mode like you would at home.

If you did own a travel router that supports wifi repeater mode while doing NAT, then you would probably also need to use MAC address spoofing on the router to trick their network into thinking the router is actually your router or laptop — reason being that only a phone or laptop has a web browser to let you login to their captive portal with the username-password they assign you. So what you’d do is connect your phone or laptop to hotel wifi real quick, login to the captive portal with your web browser thereby authenticating that device MAC address with the hotel, then you’d want to quickly turn off your phone/laptop wifi and quickly turn on the wifi for the router with the spoofed MAC address so that it takes over the authenticated wifi session.

I’m not 100% sure if these methods will work because I haven’t tested them myself. I am looking to get an GL-iNet travel router soon to solve this same problem for myself.

 

[doczenith1]

What you need is a HooToo Wireless Travel Router. I have the Nano model. It passes the captive portal information to your wireless device (phone, tablet etc) upon which you log into the network. Once that is complete you can log into the wifi network that you setup on the HooToo with your devices. I've successfully used 3 devices via the HooToo on multiple wireless networks that only allow one device. The HooToo becomes this "one" device.

I believe the HooToo will also let you input a username and password if the wireless network doesn't use a captive portal.

 

[joltdude]

Id try something more among the lines of the GL-Inet Slate / GL-AR750S which also has some hardware acceleration for VPN as an option as well.. Plus similar to this community , they are quite active with the devs and users and take feedback well... plus they are constantly working on stuff to make it easier to deal with captive portals and such... Unfortunately ASUS does not seem to have a product in this market.

 

[Zonkd]

Id try something more among the lines of the GL-Inet Slate / GL-AR750S which also has some hardware acceleration for VPN as an option as well.. Plus similar to this community , they are quite active with the devs and users and take feedback well... plus they are constantly working on stuff to make it easier to deal with captive portals and such... Unfortunately ASUS does not seem to have a product in this market.

@joltdude it sounds like you are familiar with gl-inet. Do you own a slate? If so what do you think of it? How well does it handle captive portal?

@doczenith1 im interested by your description of how hootoo conveniently passes captive portal information to devices connected to the router. I wonder if gl-inet slate could do this. It sounds much easier than the method I described in my last post.

 

[doczenith1]

First step with the HooToo is to do the initial setup at home. I forget the details but you set up an SSID and password to use with your devices. Once at the hotel (for example) you connect to the HooToo wifi and then browse to 192.168.1.254. You then use HooToo's GUI and have it scan for available wifi. When you see the SSID of the hotel you select it in the GUI and hit save. After that I believe you open another tab and it presents the captive portal or maybe you need to enter a URL provided by the hotel (it's been a while and might depend on the hotel). You input the credentials provided by the hotel and the HooToo logs onto the hotel wifi. After that you just connect your devices to the SSID you set up earlier on the HooToo and you are good to go. I've used it on a flight before with gogo and it worked great. I powered it with an old 3000 mAh power pack and micro usb cable and it only used 25% or so of the battery on a two hour flight.

I took a look at the Slate. I think it serves a similar but different function than the HooToo. It's repeater mode is similar but it needs a password to connect to the "hotel" wifi and doesn't mention any means to connect when there is the captive portal. It is basically just providing a secure method of connecting all your devices to the public wifi if I'm understanding their website correctly.

 

[NoelS]

If an important consideration for you, AFAIK, the HooToo (cute name) does not support VPN.
I own the GLI-AR300M-EXT. Only $45 on Amazon. Does this like charm. Also has VPN capability.

 

[doczenith1]

Just to avoid any confusion, as @NoelS mentioned, the HooToo does not have to the capability to act as a VPN client and route all traffic through that VPN. The HooToo does however work with any VPN client that you wish to run on each individual device that you connect to the HooToo with.