Breaking the internet (hotels, guestnet style)

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Dec 9 20:23:40 UTC 2009


On Dec 9, 2009, at 10:41 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> Jens Link wrote:
>> Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> writes:
>>
>>> I expect my connections to my mail server to actually reach my  
>>> mail server.  I use TLS and SMTP AUTH as well as IMAP/SSL.  Many  
>>> of the "just works" settings in question break these things badly.
>>>
>>
>> One of my customers has an appliance for his WLAN guest access access
>> which filters out AAAA records. :-(
>>
>> jens at bowmore:~$ dig AAAA www.quux.de @8.8.8.8 +short
>> jens at bowmore:~$
>>
>
> That, unfortunately, is not uncommon.  Actually, it's one of the  
> _less_
> broken systems I've seen, since IPv4 presumably keeps working.
>
> One major vendor of hotel guestnet equipment returns an A record for
> 0.0.0.1 if you do an ANY or AAAA query for any hostname--even ones  
> that
> don't exist.  At least with WinXP, you have to disable IPv6 just to  
> get
> IPv4 to work!  Worse, their tech support sees nothing wrong with this;
> if you disagree, all they'll do is offer a refund.  Unfortunately,  
> "take
> your money elsewhere" doesn't work when you've already paid for the
> hotel room--and they know it.
>
I've actually extracted significant rebates from Hotels where their  
internet
was provably broken, and, their third-party provider would not resolve
the issue.  More than just a refund of the IP fees. In one case, 1/2 the
cost of my multi-night stay.


Owen





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