John Hasler wrote: > J. Bakshi writes: > > My internet provider provides an online form accessed by local IP (the > > connection is based on eth); so that the subscriber can provide > > username and password to activate the login; additionally it also has > > a captcha as added security. > > Do you mean that you need to do this to access some Web page of theirs > that is of interest, or that you must do this every time you establish > an Internet connection? If the latter they are complete loons.
I have been weeks at locations where there only available networking was from commercial wide area wifi providers who required every initiation of connection this way. They were doing filtering based upon ethernet address and required me to authenticate so that they would register the MAC address of the machine. It was extremely annoying! From their point of view they are covering a wide area and they wanted to prevent abuse from script kiddies. Though it was very "hackishly" implemented for a commercial service. From my point of view I was purchasing a week's network connectivity, had already spent the money, and it was either use it or lose it. And there weren't any other choices available. Fortunately I was running a WRT54GL which was always on and so I could authenticate once for it and it would stay connected due to the constant trickle of network activity and then only need to repeat it manually when things failed and needed to be restarted. For me that was a few times through the course of the couple of weeks and so I just muscled through it. But I know that if I had been dealing with them long term I would have considered automating the process. Bob
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