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I currently live on a boat. Dealing with captive portal bs from the marine is always a nightmare. You have to buy the correct wifi extender/repeater otherwise y

I currently live on a boat. Dealing with captive portal bs from the marine is always a nightmare. You have to buy the correct wifi extender/repeater otherwise you have to connect each device directly to the network.

voltagex_ 4y ago
What repeater worked for you?
- gingerlime 4y ago
  not OP but I’m using a GL.iNet travel router. It’s tiny. USB powered so can be plugged to a power bank. It has an Ethernet connection as well, can use your phone’s tethering as well. Great little gadget for travel.
  - voltagex_ 4y ago
    I found the GL.inet gear underpowered, although I've only used their cheap stuff and finicky re: firmware -the last one had removed OpenWRT luci by default
    - 3np 4y ago
      The firmware is a huge mess and it's especially unfortunate that there seems to be some undocumented custom drivers or something else I haven't been able to identify yet which is missing from upstream OpenWRT, making it unusable for certain of their devices. The gl.inet firwmare itself has a lot of missing updates and I am yet to successfully make custom builds of it (though in theory it should be possible through what's on their public Github repos, save for a handful of packages they provide as binary-only). They do not respond to issues or PRs on GitHub. I should have taken better notes on building a firmware but I think what eventually allowed me to replicate and make custom build was to just build as if a normal openwrt dist from https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt with a fork of https://github.com/gl-inet/gli-pub https://github.com/gl-inet/gli-pub. Ended up ditching their custom hacky wireguard/tor functionality and mostly treating it as an openwrt dist. Still stuck on a fork of the custom 19.07 (4.x kernel) for E750 (despite my efforts to bring it to 21.02). MT1300 doesn't seem to have had any issues on vanilla openwrt 21.02, though. The mwan3 stuff can be worth keeping and extending on using the uci module, though. It really is a shame as there are so many great things with the E750 and it has potential to be the perfect travel router. If there is anyone else who wants to take this to the next level, I could be down for making this ore structured and collaborate on making a more open, accessible, secure and hackable dist either just for the E750 or glinet in general.
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  Right now I am using an Alfa wifi camp pro 2. That then feeds into a Asus router. the Alfa is pretty much an outdoor USB WiFi card plugged into a small Linux computer with additional wifi and router capabilities. I also have an Alfa camp pro 4g as backup because the marina wifi is very unreliable. They have too many APs not setup correctly. The wifi is cox enterprises. Every now and then the captive portal resets and I have to enter the months wifi password, but stick to the Alfa card.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
Can you use a smartphone, laptop, or any router running OpenWRT (in order from easiest to hardest) to simultaneously connect to the portal and rebroadcast the connection as a separate AP or Ethernet?
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  I am using an Alfa wifi camp pro 2. Which is basically a outdoor USB WiFi card going into a small Linux computer with additional wifi capabilities. That seems to do the trick. But I did try a few other out of the box solutions that did not work and had to do some research before settling in the Alfa.
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  I built that on a raspberry pi with an additional USB wifi dongle. It can establish a VPN connection to my home router, too. The idea was that if I'm in a hotel where I have to pay per device, I can use many devices without extra charge plus I can access the Netflix catalog of my home country. Also, the captive portal support on the Fire TV stick used to be bad. It worked with occasional hick ups, but in the last few years I could always use as many devices as I needed (usually two) for free, and the captive portal support on the Fire TV stick improved, so I haven't had the need for it anymore.
3np 4y ago
If you just make sure you have something customizable enough (e.g. OpenWRT or some other reasonable dist) you can make detection-and-activation-scripts for portal types you encounter often enough. Some curl and whatnot in bash usually does the trick. I'm yet to find something that needs a headless browser or js runtime. While bits and pieces of this can be found implemented in different repos, there seems to be a gap for a software which does this minimally and generally enough and could provide a base for the community to crowd-source profiles/configs/scripts.
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  I haven't dived into automating the captive portal yet. With my current setup I can access the captive portal from one device and it stays sticky to the whole network. I might look into automating it as the password changes monthly.
M4v3R 4y ago
Is the new Starlink offering something that might help you then? https://www.starlink.com/maritime https://www.starlink.com/maritime
- rafram 4y ago
  > $5,000 a month I hope the dish is gold-plated…
  - M4v3R 4y ago
    Ouch, somehow I missed the price point, that’s insane.
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  Not at the current price point.

voltagex_ 4y ago

What repeater worked for you?

gingerlime 4y ago
not OP but I’m using a GL.iNet travel router. It’s tiny. USB powered so can be plugged to a power bank. It has an Ethernet connection as well, can use your phone’s tethering as well. Great little gadget for travel.
- voltagex_ 4y ago
  I found the GL.inet gear underpowered, although I've only used their cheap stuff and finicky re: firmware -the last one had removed OpenWRT luci by default
  - 3np 4y ago
    The firmware is a huge mess and it's especially unfortunate that there seems to be some undocumented custom drivers or something else I haven't been able to identify yet which is missing from upstream OpenWRT, making it unusable for certain of their devices. The gl.inet firwmare itself has a lot of missing updates and I am yet to successfully make custom builds of it (though in theory it should be possible through what's on their public Github repos, save for a handful of packages they provide as binary-only). They do not respond to issues or PRs on GitHub. I should have taken better notes on building a firmware but I think what eventually allowed me to replicate and make custom build was to just build as if a normal openwrt dist from https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt with a fork of https://github.com/gl-inet/gli-pub https://github.com/gl-inet/gli-pub. Ended up ditching their custom hacky wireguard/tor functionality and mostly treating it as an openwrt dist. Still stuck on a fork of the custom 19.07 (4.x kernel) for E750 (despite my efforts to bring it to 21.02). MT1300 doesn't seem to have had any issues on vanilla openwrt 21.02, though. The mwan3 stuff can be worth keeping and extending on using the uci module, though. It really is a shame as there are so many great things with the E750 and it has potential to be the perfect travel router. If there is anyone else who wants to take this to the next level, I could be down for making this ore structured and collaborate on making a more open, accessible, secure and hackable dist either just for the E750 or glinet in general.
bhhaskin 4y ago
Right now I am using an Alfa wifi camp pro 2. That then feeds into a Asus router. the Alfa is pretty much an outdoor USB WiFi card plugged into a small Linux computer with additional wifi and router capabilities. I also have an Alfa camp pro 4g as backup because the marina wifi is very unreliable. They have too many APs not setup correctly. The wifi is cox enterprises. Every now and then the captive portal resets and I have to enter the months wifi password, but stick to the Alfa card.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

Can you use a smartphone, laptop, or any router running OpenWRT (in order from easiest to hardest) to simultaneously connect to the portal and rebroadcast the connection as a separate AP or Ethernet?

bhhaskin 4y ago
I am using an Alfa wifi camp pro 2. Which is basically a outdoor USB WiFi card going into a small Linux computer with additional wifi capabilities. That seems to do the trick. But I did try a few other out of the box solutions that did not work and had to do some research before settling in the Alfa.
mr_mitm 4y ago
I built that on a raspberry pi with an additional USB wifi dongle. It can establish a VPN connection to my home router, too. The idea was that if I'm in a hotel where I have to pay per device, I can use many devices without extra charge plus I can access the Netflix catalog of my home country. Also, the captive portal support on the Fire TV stick used to be bad. It worked with occasional hick ups, but in the last few years I could always use as many devices as I needed (usually two) for free, and the captive portal support on the Fire TV stick improved, so I haven't had the need for it anymore.

3np 4y ago

If you just make sure you have something customizable enough (e.g. OpenWRT or some other reasonable dist) you can make detection-and-activation-scripts for portal types you encounter often enough. Some curl and whatnot in bash usually does the trick. I'm yet to find something that needs a headless browser or js runtime. While bits and pieces of this can be found implemented in different repos, there seems to be a gap for a software which does this minimally and generally enough and could provide a base for the community to crowd-source profiles/configs/scripts.

bhhaskin 4y ago
I haven't dived into automating the captive portal yet. With my current setup I can access the captive portal from one device and it stays sticky to the whole network. I might look into automating it as the password changes monthly.

M4v3R 4y ago

Is the new Starlink offering something that might help you then? https://www.starlink.com/maritime https://www.starlink.com/maritime

rafram 4y ago
> $5,000 a month I hope the dish is gold-plated…
- M4v3R 4y ago
  Ouch, somehow I missed the price point, that’s insane.
bhhaskin 4y ago
Not at the current price point.