Wireless hotel tips - FTP and Skype connections failing
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-10-26 06:18:05 - Graham Ellis
I'm on line this week through a Spectrum interactive account, who's web site tells me that they have won a contract to supply BAA at Heathrow Terminal 5 and that they have an exclusive 7 year deal at Travelodge, where I have been staying. It's not all been a bed of roses - quite apart from a major loss of service which I've briefly comment on elsewhere, I've had a couple of other issues that I thought I would comment on as clearly this is a supplier who intends to be around in a big way, and doesn't appear to be providing a transparent connection.
a) FTP. Upload connections are being lost at the start of transfers; the solutions I have been using is to use scp instead. Thus
[within ftp] puts xz.tar
has been replaced by
[at command line] scp xz.tar whc@www.wellho.net:/home/whc/httpdocs/pix/xz.tar
b) Skype - the Skype port appears to be blocked. Perhaps SpectrumInteractive have an arrangement with one of the telecoms companies that provides phone service to some Travelodge locations to do this - but here at Swavesey there are no phones in the rooms and even the public phone has been removed. I guess most of us have a mobile these days ....
c) I have two laptops here with me. On the good side, I'm able to log either of them in as it appears that my signup hasn't been restricted to a single specific mac address as I find with many other Wifi service suppliers. Slightly less positive (but to be expected, I suppose, for security reasons) I can't use the hotel's wireless hub to communicate between my 2 computers even though they're both on the same subnet. Solution - software that lets me computer to computer network, in effect setting up one of the machines as a wireless base station itself!