Boot from CD - a winner again

Didn't expect to write anything whilst on holidays in Sydney. But couldn't resist sharing my joy of Knoppix saving me from a big row with the hotel staff.

Hotel I'm in is using a third party company to provide telecomms and broadband services. It's awfully expensive, but convenient, so I have subscribed.

So, to get online, you tune into channel 8 on your telly, choose the deal (9.95 for an hour, 44.95 for 3 days), then enter your room number - and bingo, a password is created for you. You connect your laptop and off you go. Except that the socket in our room was faulty. A very friendly manager allowed us to use another room (to test my laptop), using a password he provided for me. It worked (I never doubted my laptop). So, we move rooms altogether. Once moved, tried to connect and the fun started.

Tried the password I had generated before - error message saying - cannot activate: already active. Although the manager's password has expired, I could still connect to the Internet, and use exactly the same sites I did as part of the test, but no others. Tried clearing the browser's cache, reboot, clear the cache again for good measure, same behaviour over and over.

MAC address tied it in? Don't know, but booted from the Knoppix CD, connected the cable, punched in the password - straight in! On the same laptop, with the same hardware.

So, if not a browser's cache, not an interface number, what was it that tied my laptop to the servers information? Am I missing something? Or is the comms provider being naughty and captures more information that I would comfortably want to surrender? I left the question with the manager. Somehow, I don't expect to get any answers before we leave in three days time...

Moral of the story - Knoppix came up trupms again!