PC unable to access internet over hotel wifi

usignuolo · 21 February 2009 at 3:38PM

We went away recently for a couple of nights and chose a hotel with wifi connection as my husband's office is his laptop. He has taken it everywhere this year from Manchester to Calgary and it has worked on every wifi network he has used until this hotel. (It is set up to poll for a wifi network, and when it finds nearest, prompt for password to log in).

On this occasion, it found the hotel wifi network but then generated an error message "The settings saved on this computer do not match the requirements of the network" and we simply could not connect. The owner of the hotel got out his laptop, running Vista like my husband's, connected OK and then shrugged and said it must be an issue with our laptop - which is less than a year old and quite expensive and works everywhere else.

I have since looked up the error message on the web and found some elaborate workarounds, (meaningless to my husband, who is not a techie in any sense,) but none of these workarounds explain why the problem occurred, or if we changed our settings now whether this would affect his ability to connect via to wifi in future.

He went off to a job when we got back, and connected to the local wifi there with no problem. Was it is security issue with the hotel's network? Is the only way round it to enter a complicated (for a non techie) fix?

asininity · 21 February 2009 at 4:20PM

Is it connecting automatically? Did you need to put in a password?

Marty_J · 21 February 2009 at 4:22PM

It's going to be very difficult to ascertain what was wrong if you don't have access to the wifi network in question.

asininity · 21 February 2009 at 4:33PM

Good point! I was thinking it might be the same sort of network (ie BT openzone) and the laptop had saved a previous netwrok key from a different hotel and was trying to use that instead.

usignuolo · 21 February 2009 at 8:54PM

Maybe I can clarify a bit - the normal procedure is my husband opens up his laptop and it immediately polls automatically for the nearest wifi. When it finds it, the name of the server appears on the screen and then it normally asks him for a password, which he has usually obtained from the hotel or organisation where he is working that day. He enters it and off he goes.

On this occasion, the laptop polled for the network as usual and found the hotel's wifi as the name popped up on the screen. So far so good, then it cut him off with the message internet disconnected. There was no prompt for a password. When we looked at the properties screen for the network connection it showed his laptop with a line leading to the hotel's server and a big red X on it and the message no connection.

We then tried to enter the hotel's password via the properties window, let us say it was "georgefourth987648" - this triggered another message saying security key must be 5 or 13 characters. It said security key not password. We tried various combinations which did not work. We have never seen this particular message before.

Previously he had been in a restaurant where he works every week and uses the wifi and this has never interfered with anywhere else. The web explanations for the error message all relate to resetting automatic connection in the properties/network management window and also refer to SSID and WPA settings, something which I do not understand and there would be no point explaining to him.

Could it be that the hotel has a newer server which conforms to a different standard to most or that it has a firewall, or that it only recognises staff pcs and not guests (the barman who gave us the password said he had never been asked for it by a guest before).

m_13 · 21 February 2009 at 9:15PM

I stayed a hotel recently where I never managed to connect to the hotel network but used the unsecured wifi from a house next door!

WEP uses 5 or 13 character keys but these are normally entered in hexadecimal. A 5 character key is 10 hexadecimal characters long and a 13 character key is 26 hexadecimal characters long.

So a password like georgefourth987648 (too long at 18 characters) would be entered in hexadecimal as:
67656f726765666f75727468393837363438

I suspect that the barman didn't know what he was being asked for and gave you something completely different. It was probably the password to login to something else!

robt_2 · 21 February 2009 at 10:06PM

I suspect that this hotel (by coincidence) had a network of the same name of one which had been used in the past and the laptop was trying to connect with the old pasword/key.

I would put money on it.

Mrs_Moc · 21 February 2009 at 10:12PM

A similar thing happened to me at splash landings hotel at Alton towers. They had their computer guy working at my laptop for over 4 hours before he gave up.

He told me he would try again the next day but he seemed doubtful and I didnt want to waste any more of our holiday time.

usignuolo · 21 February 2009 at 10:45PM

The hotel wifi site we could see but not connect to, had the name of the Hotel, which is quite distinctive and unlikely to be duplicated.

However my husband does have a lot of network connections listed on his laptop (saved automatically) from wherever he connects, so if the hotel's internal network was called say Network One and he already has one called Network One on his laptop that might be true.

And I assume you mean there is an internal pass key associated with each wifi network and the hotel network could not handshake with husband's laptop because he was already set up for another Network with same name but different passkey.

How do you clear this out? He is using Vista.