[COLUG] Panera and/or Easton Wifi

[William Yang]

jep200404 wrote:
> "Scott Merrill" wrote:
> 
>> Panera at Easton ... Ubuntu Ohio "release party"
> 
> How friendly is Panera's Wifi for Linux clients? 
> What does it require? Login? Javascript? Java? Flash? 

My Linux box does well at Panera, generally.  Though not so much recently, 
I used to do my consulting contract work from resturants with wifi around 
Columbus a day or two a week (the kids get loud when you work at home ;-).

I've done well with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Centos on laptops in Panera 
locations.  Generally speaking, it attaches fine.  You have accept their 
terms of service before you can get out of their captive portal -- 
javascript and http, as I recall.  I would use a browser, the way they 
intended (never got up the gumption to analyze the redirected auth page and 
figure out how to accept their terms automatically).

I've had good success with Cisco VPNs (ipsec over tcp or udp), ssh and 
other SSL-protected protocols from Panera locations; I've had spotty 
problems with protocol types outside of tcp/udp/icmp over IP, though I'd 
recommend evaluating that on a location-by-location basis (PPTP, L2TP, 
IPSEC without AH, etc).

	-Bill
-- 
William Yang
wyang at gcfn.net