Our hotel doesn’t have free Internet service. The only way to get onto the Internet from our hotel is paid ASDL dial-up, cable not supplied. I was ok with this because there is an inexpensive Internet cafe across the street. What I am not ok with is no phone service in my room. I had to make a phone call today and the stupid swipe-your-credit-card-before-you-can-make-a-call phone wouldn’t give me a damn dial tone. I couldn’t even dial 777, which is the HELP LINE! Instead of calling the front desk, which even if the phone was working you can’t do, to fix the problem I decided to “acquire” the Internet instead.
The phone is plugged into a box that has two RJ-45 jacks, colored red and green, and the RJ-11 jack. The red RJ-45 jack has a cable leading to the box that is plugged into the TV. I’m assuming the box is used for the paid on-demand programming. So I plug my computer into the green RJ-45 jack. Nothing happens. I look around for anything I can use as a screw driver to remove the faceplate. Next to the coffee pot I find a spoon. I remove to faceplate with the spoon to find that the green RJ-45 jack is not connected. At this point I figure what the hell and unplugged the cable in the red RJ-45 jack and plugged my laptop into the red jack. Success! Not really. I get an IP address but I can’t route anything. It appears that the hotels DNS server doesn’t allow for external name lookup. If I had only memorized the IP address of jparks.net… Not to be foiled, I open up my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and get the IP address of jparks.net. Can I ping that IP address? Yes! Can I ssh to that address? Yes! Do I now have the IP address of google.com? Yes! Does a Google search turn up an IP address for a public DNS server for the UK? Yes! Do I now have Internet! YES! Am I going to get sprayed with CS gas and then arrested for “acquiring” the Internet? Probably;-)
