Using “free” wi-fi on Linux

I recently found myself at a train station that claimed to offer “free super-fast wi-fi”; but when I connected to it, I was stuck with a little question mark in the gnome toolbar, and the chrome dinosaur .

I’m not the first person to note this, but I did manage to get it working… eventually.

I opened up a terminal, and even though the browser was sad, I could ping:

$ ping google.com PING google.com (216.58.214.14) 56(84) bytes of data. From _gateway (10.102.0.5) icmp_seq=1 Destination Net Prohibited

Sort of. DNS was working, anyway. So I tried curl:

$ curl -vL "https://www.google.com" * Rebuilt URL to: https://www.google.com/ * Trying 172.217.19.196... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to www.google.com (172.217.19.196) port 443 (#0) ... snip ...

And it looked like I was getting the actual Google homepage, not a hijacked page, which was interesting.

At that point I took the IP address from that request, and stuck it directly in the browser, hoping to skip straight there; and now the browser decided to show me the T&C page I needed. Once I’d ticked the right box, I was online.