Often I’m in one of those free wifi hotel room networks, that lets you into the internet with a web browser (Edge, Firefox, Opera, etc.), but not more than that.
When I try using various e-mail clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.), it can’t establish a connection.
When I try using various Youtube clients, it can’t establish a conncetion.
When I try to update my system (Multi boot: Manjaro, Kali, Windows), it can’t establish a connection (even though the updates run over http, like a normal web browser does).
Strangely I can update Firefox (Portable Version) on Windows.
Is there a way to solve this issue?
Also, another (or maybe still part of the same) problem, is when I’m browsing the internet with e.g. Firefox, there are various sites that I can’t get to.
E.g. I’m googling Wikipedia, I click on the link to it, and come to something called “Fortinet” blocking me from getting to Wikipedia.
I can’t browse Wikipedia! Oh come on.
Do you had similar issues, and how have you solved them?
You can get various travel routers that basically run a VPN connection to your home network and tunnel your traffic through that. This provides more security while connected to the public wifi network at a hotel and should be able to get around traffic restrictions by not allowing the firewall at the hotel see your traffic. The speed you get will depend on the hotels bandwidth they let you use, the performance of the travel router, the performance of your home router, how fast of a home internet you have, and how far away from home you are. Lot of variables, but the slowest one is usually the hotel’s bandwidth. Often they give you only 1-2mb, and sometimes even refer to that as “high speed”. You cant do much on it and videos will always have buffer issues.
You may be better off switching to an unlimited cell plan with a large amount of hotspot bandwidth on the plan. That gets you around all site restrictions and lets you have much better speed. You can get a plan from an MVNO rather than a main carrier and often find a better deal. For example (not meaning to advertise, I do use this company myself and this is just a pricing example), if you get an annual paid plan from US Mobile it uses the Verizon 5G network and has 50GB hotspot bandwidth for $37.50 a month. This is often less than typical people’s cell plans costs and has a lot of hotspot data for your needs here in a hotel situation.
First off, … I’m sorry. I’d consider changing the hotel or maybe not relying on hotel wifi if it’s in such a sorry state.
If I had to guess, it’s probably filtering DNS and filtering further on IP+PORT + SNI header.
As for VPNs, Tailscale might be the easiest way to setup a safe VPN through home, it might be able to punch through to one of the DERP servers that run on various clouds - not sure.
It’s easy to install. at home and on laptop.
at home, join your tailnet, enable exit node
go to admin console allow it to be an exit node.
on road, join the tailnet, choose to use the home exit node.
if your home machine is busted, you can rent a cheap VPS (I like BuyVM for this not sure if they’re the best choice for you).
maybe you can obfuscate your traffic in smarter ways on buyvm
If your home computer is up, but you can’t ssh to it to begin with, you can try Tor with Snowflake or OBFS4.
Tailscale is really the easiest way, yeah. I have it for occasional convenience, not for for “VPN” reasons, but as an example I was recently at a hospital, standard web-portal-login guest network stuff. It was actually mostly fine with what I was doing, but for some reason Steam was blocked.
I have my home unit set up to run an Exit Node on Tailscale, so just toggled that on and totally fine.
I’d consider changing the hotel or maybe not relying on hotel wifi if it’s in such a sorry state.