Cannot get to captive portal page on public hotel wifi

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21

Sorry, I am totally wrong by mistaken nss-dns with nss-mdns.

22

What’s the output of dig @192.168.184.1 hoteltyrol.inwya.com?

If the above resolves the IP address of hoteltyrol.inwya.com, you could (although this is not recommended under most circumstances), enable nss-dns, modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at ‘files’ before ‘dns’ and then add an entry for hoteltyrol.inwya.com into your /etc/hosts:

<IP Address resolved with ‘dig’ command above> hoteltyrol.inwya.com

I won’t guarantee that will work, but it could very well get you do the captive portal to gain internet access.

HTHAL

23

files are always before any other network related plugin. including mdns variants, resolve or dns module. With systemd-resolved it should be enough to force inwya.com or hoteltyrol.inwya.com domain to link provided servers.

yes, placing it temporary into /etc/hosts might help, but I would recommend against it.

24

yes, placing it temporary into /etc/hosts might help, but I would recommend against it.

As I said:

If the above resolves the IP address of hoteltyrol.inwya.com, you could (although this is not recommended under most circumstances), enable nss-dns, modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at ‘files’ before ‘dns’ and then add an entry for hoteltyrol.inwya.com into your /etc/hosts

25

Thanks, I removed it and I’ll keep it in mind (since the network offers both, so it might get added back automatically).

; <<>> DiG 9.18.44 <<>> @192.168.184.1 hoteltyrol.inwya.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 58496
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
; COOKIE: 169849a8b8a754a2 (echoed)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hoteltyrol.inwya.com.          IN      A

;; Query time: 162 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.184.1#53(192.168.184.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Wed Feb 11 17:57:09 CET 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 61

I’m not seeing any other ip address than 192.168.184.1. Adding that to /etc/hosts as suggested (192.168.184.1 hoteltyrol.inwya.com) results in “too many redirects” when I try to get to the portal again, so I think I may have done something wrong there.

26

I’m not seeing any other ip address than 192.168.184.1. Adding that to /etc/hosts as suggested (192.168.184.1 hoteltyrol.inwya.com) results in “too many redirects” when I try to get to the portal again, so I think I may have done something wrong there.

Nope. You did that correctly. But 192.168.184.1 isn’t responding to your DNS request with the IP address associated with the captive portal.

What you’d hope to see is something like this:



$ dig inria.fr

; <<>> DiG 9.18.44 <<>> inria.fr
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63837
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4000
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;inria.fr.                      IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
inria.fr.               127     IN      A       128.93.162.83

You should see an “Answer Section” with the IP address requested. But that doesn’t seem to be happening here.

In my experience with such hotel portals, I’d expect all DNS names and IP addresses would be redirected to the captive portal through your browser. It’s not clear why that isn’t the case here.

If it were me, I’d probably attempt to capture network traffic with tcpdump while trying to connect to the portal and see if that provides any useful information.