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Re: Hotels and debian



Hi,

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 09:27:23AM -0700, Andrew Sweger wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Bob Hauck wrote:
> 
> > At least the Mariott Courtyard in Red Bank, NJ, does not require DHCP.  I
> > just plugged in my Debian laptop with the same static IP I use in the
> > office and it worked.
> > 
> > I'm pretty sure they are doing NAT.  As for the gateway issue, what
> > happens if they put their gateway in promiscuous mode and just NAT
> > everything outbound?  There must also be some monitoring of active ports
> > as well, since you get billed even if you didn't visit their web page <G>.
> 
> Correct. That is the STSN network (stsn.com). It's a network piggybacked
> on the house phone circuits. It transparently accepts any ("valid") IP
> address from the client, fakes a route (point-to-point I think), and NAT's
> the client to the internet (after charging your account, of course). In
> Starwood (Sheraton) hotels, they've started putting in Cisco 575 LRE hubs
> (Long Reach Ethernet) the stack Ethernet and the phone circuit onto the
> house phone lines to a Cisco Catalyst 2900 LRE XL (and a MS ISA box). They
> work in a similar fashion.

This is very interesting.

I used a HOTEL in Tokyo and was wondering how they do it.  This was DHCP
service in terms of IP assignment.  But NAT was one factor.  They did
some interesting trick on SMTP.

As you know, SMTP server on many company LAN are not accessible from
outside of firewall unless VPN is used and many ISPs block SMTP
connection to outside of their network.  If I use HOME or some dial-up
ISP, I tend to change SMTP server address.  

At these HOTEL ETHERNET service, I did not reset the SMTP host address.
The HOTEL ETHERNET service redirected any SMTP connection request to
their mail server relay.  This was pleasant surprise after looking for
instruction to set my mail configuration.

I think this can be easily done by NAT (IP FORWARDING) and local 
SMTP service.

Good luck :)
-- 
~\^o^/~~~ ~\^.^/~~~ ~\^*^/~~~ ~\^_^/~~~ ~\^+^/~~~ ~\^:^/~~~ ~\^v^/~~~ +++++
 Osamu Aoki @ Cupertino CA USA
 See "User's Guide":     http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/users-guide/
 See "Debian reference": http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/
 "Debian reference" Project at: http://qref.sf.net

 I welcome your constructive criticisms and corrections.


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