I have some trouble setting up my OpenWRT 18.06.2 router (Netgear R6220) as wifi client. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction...
I want to connect to the "Vodafone Homespot" service which allows internet access over wifi after logging in with an account on a landing page. From that point on, it remembers the MAC address of the device so it is not necessary to log in again.
However, logging in only works from my laptop and my phone, when I connect them directly to the Homespot wifi. When I connect my laptop to my router (which was reset to default settings) via ethernet, go to LuCI and hit "Join wifi" for the "Vodafone Homespot" network, the router will get an IP from some 10.x subnet, but from my laptop I do not get the Vodafone login page (or any network access outside 192.168.1.x, for that matter).
Hi fantom-x, thank you, that sounds very promising.
Unfortunately I currently have no internet connection on the router, so I cannot install the package from within LuCI. I will try to manually download the following packages, hoping they are all the dependencies I need, to copy them to a flash drive and install them in OpenWRT
To install packages you could use internet connection sharing on the PC to get your router a temporary connection through your PC. Or hotspot your smartphone which lets you connect via wifi with no login.
This tends to be considerably easier than manually hunting down all the dependency ipk's.
I ended up needing only luci-app-travelmate, travelmate and luci-lib-jsonc over a fresh 18.06.4. The latter was already present but in an older version.
I managed to install luci-app-travelmate and have configured it to use the Homespot wifi. On the laptop, it gives me only a mangled version of the captive portal that is not functional.
Ok, got it. I actually ended up doing exactly this: Cloning my router's MAC adress to my laptop's wifi card. First, find out the MAC of the router's wireless adapter used to connect to the Homespot wifi (mine has two, one for 802.11bgn and one for 802.11ac). Then power off the router. On the laptop (running Linux), run this:
[replace if-name-here by the actual interface name, e.g. wlp3s0]
[replace new-mac-here and old-mac-here by the MAC address, e.g. 12:ab:ba:21:00:ff]
ip link show if-name-here # find out original MAC, save for later
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here down
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here address new-mac-here # set it to the router's wifi mac address
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here up
then, connect to the wifi, log in on the captive portal landing page, disable wifi
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here down
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here address old-mac-here # restore original MAC
sudo ip link set dev if-name-here up
