Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I was eating my regular Green Burger (no, it’s not vegetarian) at Goodies today, when I noticed something WiFi related on the receipt. I looked closely and found out that there was a free WiFi access.

So, I powered up my notebook and decided to check it out. It got the IP address just fine, but nothing else worked. I tried to access a couple of sites with the browser - nope. Pinging a few IPs, including my own server did work either.

I looked back at the receipt and saw a randomly generated username and password printed on. At first I thought that these are for the PCs which are available to anyone at Goodies, but now I wasn’t so sure anymore. Probably they could be used to login to a proxy server or something like that.

IP settings showed 192.168.1.1 as a default gateway. So I tried that address in my browser and guess what - it worked. But I saw something totally different from what I was expecting. What I saw was a login screen to a 3Com wireless access point. It wasn’t asking for any username, and it printed ‘Default is admin‘ near the password field.

Sure enough, I typed it in and, o-oh, it worked. I got fully administrative rights to their acess point. I looked around here and there andn found an option that was saying something along the lines of ‘Allow all internal PCs access the Internet’. I enabled it and the web started working. Oh, my…

Complete self-service I call it - not only you have to get your own food, but you also have to configure your Internet access on your own.