"hacking" the network at the Atlantis (Nassau, Bahamas)

I thought I'd catch the attention of people with a somewhat out-of-line title. What I'm going to describe actually isn't anything that I did to do something that I wasn't paying for or that the Atlantis last week. I just figured out ways around the fact that you couldn't access the internet with your laptop in our hotel room. I should also note that this may not work in different parts of the Atlantis - the hotel is enormous and really is three or four hotels in one (something that made the trip all the more interesting) - it worked great in the Royal Towers and specifically the Imperial Club. One of the nicest things about the hotel, though, was that they had wifi where it counts: outside, at the pools and in a lot of the open lounge areas throughout the hotel. (The only thing they did wrong from a technical standpoint was overlapping 802.11b/g network channels all over the place - sometimes making it impossible to grab a good signal even if you were close to the AP.) I wrote the hotel back in January to figure out whether or not they had high speed access and they answered with:

Dial-up for $.50 a min? That's crazy talk - though not as crazy as the $1.00/min. I paid while on Grand Cayman some years ago. (I was happy with everything else, though.) What really got me, though, was the fact that wireless service was available everywhere but my room. So, being the wireless hack I am, I packed a 9 dBm 2.4GHz omni antenna, pigtails and two travel routers I have (the Linksys WRT54GC (no link because linksys.com isn't loading correctly, again) and the D-Link DWL-G730AP) hoping that because our rooms overlooked some of the pool decks that I'd be able to pull a signal from there and "bounce" it into my room ;) Steph was thrilled as she saw me pack everything... What I didn't realize was that the Linksys could not be set to client mode, so the omni and pigtails were no good. Plus, I didn't bring a 12' extension cord like I normally do - making it difficult to hang the D-Link over the side of the balcony. As a side note, I had to laugh as I was packing the omni into my bag - it looks like a pipe bomb unless you know what it is (and are oblivious to the N connector on the end of it), so I used a magic marker and wrote 2.4 GHz Antenna all over it to make sure that if someone unpacked it, they would come to their senses if they had any questions - and, of course, it would scan like a pipe with a piece of wire in it.
Well, the first thing I did when we got to our room was pull out the OQO (trying to be discrete so as to not anger Steph) and see if I could grab a wireless signal from our balcony. No dice. I didn't have anything urgent to do, so I left well enough alone and decided to experiment later. Later, when Steph was taking a nap, I took out the D-Link (which can be powered from your USB port), hooked it up to my MacBook and hung it over the balcony to see if directionality of the antenna had to be such to grab a signal. Again, no dice. I looked around the room to see if they had anything for broadband set up, but just hidden. I saw an RJ-45 jack, but decided not to play because I couldn't trace what it was going to and I had burnt out a NIC in the past "testing" a jack only to find that it was powered weird and my NIC couldn't handle it. Later, at the pool, I pulled the "pid-guest" ssid fine, hopped on, paid my $10 for 24/hrs and went to town. For all the problems we had with the telephone system at the Atlantis (it sucks, by the way - the phones are crackly, they don't hang up properly and a call to the States is $3/min. even using a Global Crossing calling card), the internet connection was blazing fast. Down by the pools, I was getting 3-6mbps up and down. (This is where I learned to use Gizmo and love it - and hate Skype.) Now that my wireless MAC was registered, I figured I could squeak out a signal from the room. I was right - only half of the time, though. With my MacBook perched as in the photo, I was only able to grab a signal sometimes (having to do with the overlapping network problems). But, when I needed it, it worked, and if not, I went to the pool - which was the whole purpose of the vacation to begin with!
A bug got in me a few days before we left, though, to figure out how their IPTV stuff worked. So, I moved the hutch that the television (a 32" LG LCD - nice) perched on and took a peek at all of the wiring. Lo and behold! There was a VIA mini-itx PC mounted to the back of the hutch and controlled some of the streaming media and internet-over-tv stuff that they had set up. Ironically, I found out where that RJ-45 jack I had initially seen led to: a NIC labeled laptop on the mini-pc. The main NIC was being used to connect to what appeared to be a network. So, I started playing. The main jack to the room must be set up so that each computer grabs a statically assigned IP from the hotel network because while the connection went active on the MacBook, I wasn't able to pull an IP. I also wasn't able to figure out what subnet they were running on. On the other side of the mini-pc, though, when I plugged into the laptop NIC, I got an address and a gateway. A lot of times, the cheap and easy way for a hotel or airport to keep you from using their network for internet access is by not setting up DNS via the DHCP services. So, in order to grab a site, you have to know the IP or use your own DNS caching server. (Not a problem when you own a few, like me - or if you have a caching server set up on your laptop, like me.) I tested to see whether I could ping some known gateways, like that of Anywhere Technology or some boxes I know the IPs to on the net. What was really odd is that pings would go through, but the connection would be really, really lossy. So, it wasn't DNS. After playing for a bit, I opened up a browser window to see if anything would come up. To my delight a window showing a log-in screen and you-are-going-to-pay-for-this option. So, I tried to say okay to the $10/day charge and see if data would be routed correctly. Something went wrong every which way. Finally, it occurred to me that I had seen an internet-over-your-tv screen on the tv and went to look and see what was there. In the spendy mood, I okayed the $10/day charge to my room to access the internet via the tv and an IR keyboard they had. Mozilla popped up and I tested going to a few sites - and it worked. (The mini-pc was running some customized form of Linux that I had no desire to further figure out.) With general browsing working, I plugged the Linksys router into the secret laptop/RJ-45 port that I had seen when we first got there, got an IP on the router and went to town again... Nice. The only trick you had to figure out was how to get the min-pc to pass data - and that was easy - set up internet service through the television interface and suddenly your hidden RJ-45 jack becomes useful. Whew... that was a lot of work just to get on the net for a few days - all when I really only cared about it outside anyway. It was worth it, though. The connection was ridiculously fast - I ran a speed test a few times to Speakeasy in Atlanta (I learned that was one of the cable termination points to the undersea cables going to the Bahamas) and got 16mbps up and down. Hot damn... I've been on a connection that fast only a few times in my life and ironically, I had nothing to download ;) (Having ran and owned an ISP, I don't like to download crap just because.... I like having a purpose/reason.)
So, I effectively hacked the hotel networks in the room so that I could get internet in bed, which is what I didn't care about anyway. (Maybe this should really be labeled a "workaround.") Next time we go, I'll not only know better, but I'll bring some different gear so that I can simply use either the room connection or the one by the pool. It is nice to know, though, that the connections are reliable and available. I saved myself the $3/min phone calls by using Gizmo and paying $.01/min for my calls to the States. That's another thing I'm happy for - VoIP - but that's another story.