MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Free Network Access at Magenta Shores

Posted on 2008-04-27 22:00:09, modified on 2008-04-27 22:00:00
Tags: Networking, Free Internet

I had the luxury of a short break at the Magenta Shores near Tuggerah Lake and being for four days away without internet access is a real challenge. But nothing to worry about, the hotel has internet access for an outrageous price. So, how does their network work?

IP address allocation is easy: Use DHCP and you get an IP address out of the 10.0.0.0/21 range. Your default gateway is a FreeBSD box which blocks all traffic except ICMP and DNS and listens on port 3128 (with a Squid proxy), port 80 (Apache + mod_php), port 53 (DNS), port 22 (SSH), port 25 (SMTP) and port 21 (a non-anonymous FTP server).

The first /24 of the /21 has a couple of other IP addresses in it which respond to pings, but it all were switches. With passwords.

So, what fun can we have?

First, the SMTP server is forwarding all messages to the internet: You can send email but you can't receive it.

The proxy server is properly locked, I couldn't find a way around it. All traffic towards it was redirected to the webserver on the default gateway asking for your password. In the root of the webserver was a menu for hotel management and system management, but it was all password protected.

The DNS service on the default gateway is working too, and... port 53/UDP is unblocked! I bought half an hour of internet time from them, used the SSH over the HTTP/CONNECT trick and seven minutes later I had an OpenVPN link up and running through that hole. I had been thinking about using the DNS tunneling application, but I would never manage to get that up and running in the half hour I paid for.

Just running tcpdump itself shows that there is a lot of multicast traffic being broadcasted by the default gateway. Unfortunately mplayer couldn't make sense of it. The traffic was most likely for the boxes connected to the TV (and the network of course): Resetting one gave a DHCP request and an IGMP join packet. The boxes itself were without brand, name, type or anything else useful to identify them: I didn't open them because they were attached with tie-straps which I couldn't replace.

And the last thing I did was running traceroute in firewall evasion mode. After the default gateway came an 192.168.1.1 address and then an iiNet broadband connection. Funny that they didn't manage to change the 192.168. address to an 10. address.

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Comments:
From: Naomi@mavetju.org
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Posted on: 2008-04-28 10:56:19
CommentYou happy hax0r!!
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From: Ed
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Posted on: 2011-04-15 16:42:32
Commentlol! 1337! :)
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