LIFE IS A HIGHWAY

One of my favorite things to do on the road is to have some comforts of home. I always take a favorite pillow case (it makes a difference trust me) and I bring my own shower head (learned this from my old friend Jimmy). Having the same shower wherever you go becomes a nice routine. Also I bring smaller versions of my favorite shampoo’s and soaps. Again these may sound trivial, but the familiarity of the scents helps start each day with a piece of home. To this I present that having my AppleTV is another piece of home. Getting the AppleTV and all of your own programming in your room really helps make you feel at ease. Ive noted there is one piece of connecting the AppleTV to the hotels WiFi. It’s very simple to do but does take a bit of getting under the hood of your computer.

(these are instructions for MacOSx, I am sure you can do this in PC land, but I don’t know how)

We will essentially be spoofing the MAC address (each device on the interwebs has one, its the finger print of your device on the network, no two are alike) of your AppleTV to a device that can authenticate through the hotel’s WiFi Captive Portal. Most hotels have the Captive Portal set to display when the DHCP server has been asked for a lease to a mac address. So we will be borrowing the fingerprints of the AppleTV, properly authenticating on a device that can do this successfully, and then handing the fingerprints back to the AppleTV.

I usually open notes and put these next two items into a new note:

**BE SURE TO DISCONNECT FROM HOTEL WIFI** (do not turn off the WiFi just disconnect from the hotel WiFi)

Find the Mac of your network interface: System Preference > Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced > Hardware > AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (copy this)

Find the AppleTV mac address: Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi Address (copy this too)

Now for some jiggery pokery in the networking subsystem

Open terminal ( I like homebrew because it looks like WarGames)

$ sudo ifconfig en0 ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (mac address of AppleTV)

Check it:

$ grep ether (make sure the MAC matches your AppleTV)

Okay now connect to the Hotel’s wireless on your laptop, and go thru the authentication process needed. Once your computer is browsing the internet, you can now turn off the WiFi on your laptop and your AppleTV should be able to connect to the Hotel WiFi

now to clean up the mess on your laptop

$ sudo ifconfig en0 ether 11:22:44:55:66 (mac address of your laptop)

$ grep ether (make sure the MAC matches your laptop)

That’s it! Enjoy your latest home away from home convenience…