W-LAN hotspot && firefox && Konqueror

[guru at Sisis.de]

Hi,

Last week I was traveling to Amsterdam and tried to use in some
hotel the W-LAN of http://www.swisscom-eurospot.com/ ...

In the hotel they selled me a card with some code on it and the
how-to use on the card only claimed:

1. set the SSID to 'eurospot'
2. start your browser
3. enter the user ID and password from this card

Note: In the point 2. there was not mentioned any URL to go, just
'start your browser'. I did so and after:

# ifconfig iwi0 ssid eurospot
# dhclient iwi0

I already got an IP, /etc/resolv.conf but could no go to nowhere,
of course not, because at this point no user ID and password was
entered. So I launched KDE's Konqueror (mine one starts with empty
page), nothing happened (of course not). I tried to go to some
URL in Internet and it did not worked, nothing happened....

I already wanted return the card to the hotel when a colleague said:
try it with Mozilla or Firefox. So I launched Firefox, went to
the same URL which did not worked with Konqueror and ... this
brought up some login-page of
http://login03.swisscom-eurospot.com/login.php?LANG=es&UserID=&RadiusReply=
(and not the page of the URL I've put in into firefox) and I could
enter the user ID and password from the card and after this all
worked fine and tranparently.

I tried it again and again sometimes to get an idea what's going on and
especially to know why it works this way with Mozilla or Firefox
but not with KDE Konqueror. I've monitored the traffic with
tcpdump as well and all I could figure out is:

- if you start Firefox this automatically makes DNS lookup and
  fetches pages from
  http://fxfeeds.mozilla.org which is somehow in the bookmarks
  of Firefox; note in this case the DNS lookup works;
- the HTTP packages coming back from fxfeeds.mozilla.org contain
  a HTTP statement: Location:http://login03.swisscom-eu...
  i.e. are pointing to that login page of swisscom-eurospot

- if you start Konqueror, nothing is fetched automatically and
  somehow the DNS lookup for any page you want to fetch does
  not resolve;

Could someone bring more light into this and has an idea for
the next time how to bring up the W-LAN with KDE Konqueror?

Thx in advance

	Matthias

-- 
Matthias Apitz / Sisis Informationssysteme GmbH
ein Tochterunternehmen der OCLC PICA B.V. Leiden (NL)
D-82041 Oberhaching, Gruenwalder Weg 28g
Fon: +49 89 / 61308-351, Fax: -399, Mobile +49 170 4527211
http://www.sisis.de/~guru/