Getting free wifi forever in airports on Mint 17.1
Many airports have free wifi services. The problem with these is that they are time-limited, usually to 1 to 3 hours. This can be very annoying if one is stuck in an airport for an extended period, as I am right now.
Non-technical solution
If you have spent your time on one device, you can simply switch to a new one. If you have brought a smartphone, tablet and a laptop, you can use the time on each of these.
This solution may be sufficient in some situations.
Technical solution
The wifi services rely on your computers MAC address to identity you. They keep track of these and so when you have used all the time on a given MAC, it will be temporarily blocked from using the internet again.
The solution is simple: we kill the batman we switch to a new MAC address every time one has expired. How do we do this? The built in network controller can change the MAC address, but this did not work for me. Instead I downloaded macchanger using:
sudo apt-get install macchanger
This is a small program that lets you easily change MAC addresses. I found a ton of guides, but they did not fully work.
Here's my current routine.
Disable the wifi using by clicking turn off in the dock-menu.
Delete the previous connection to the network.
Open a terminal as root.
Type:
macchanger -s wlan0
to show the current MAC address.
Type:
macchanger -a wlan0
to get a new similar MAC address.
Re-do step (4) to see that it worked.
Turn on wifi.
Connect to the network.
Enjoy internet for as long as it lasts, start over from step (1).
I'm not sure if everything here is strictly necessary, but this works for me.