Dinesh Joshi wrote:
Coming to the technical aspect of this thread, they have a really annoying login system ( which is a big security threat as well ). They basically rely on their DNS servers to authenticate the user. For example, if I'm not logged in and I type google.com, their DNS server returns an internal IP ( 10.x.x.x ) and they issue a 302 redirect so the browser is redirected to a login page. This is where you enter your credentials and you get logged in. This is a very annoying method of logging in the user but now-a-days many ISPs prefer it! On Linux you have the option of using a script called AutoLogin to keep you logged in 24x7.
Heres the gotcha! This connection wouldn't work when I connected it to the WAN port of my wireless router ( Netgear WGR614v5 ). The problem was / is that when my router gets the IP and DNS information from the DHCP server, it ends up with 4 DNS servers but it remembers only 2 =P The first two are vanilla DNS servers while the last two take care of redirecting and logging in the user. So the router was querying the vanilla DNS servers and it never redirected me to the login page.
They also have MAC address binding in place =P
Try this out. Set your router's MAC to the desktop MAC and use dhcp in the router's WAN. Let your router's LAN be a regular local LAN. In your desktop, setup a static IP of the LAN network. In your desktop DNS settings use the 4 DNS server entries in the same order as would be without the router. The procedure to log you on should work just the same. Once you are logged in, others in the LAN can use the net directly as they would in a router.