The other side of the moon

If you're a frequent flier, or are flying first or business class out of Mumbai, then you'll get access to the Clipper Lounge. They provide free wifi, but it doesn't really work as advertised.

You first connect to the wifi network, and open your browser, which gets redirected to a login page. You click on Complimentary Internet access, and get to a form that asks for your personal details, and phone number, claiming that they will send you an access code via SMS.

Do NOT enter your real phone number here. For starters, no SMS gets sent. Secondly, you'll start getting SMS spam. Use any 10 digit phone number. Enter 91 for the country code.

Now, once you do this, you'll get an intermediate page that will immediately redirect to a second page that shows you your username and password. The password on that page is wrong. Instead, what you want to do is hit escape as soon as you get the intermediate page. It's blue, and it has the database insert statement that looks like this:

insert into users 
(u_username, u_password, u_user_type,u_fullname,u_initial_quota,
 u_current_quota,u_persistant_quota,u_interim_interval,
 u_idle_timeout,u_expiration_date,u_nbr_concurrent_sessions,
 u_max_concurrent_sessions, u_nbr_starts, u_nbr_stops,
 fk_group_id,fk_profile_id
) values (
 'cc3zo7s', '2497161', '2', 'Morons',
 '86400', '86400', '1', '15', '600',
 '2010-05-13 22:51:28','0','1',
 '0','0','2','2'
);

In the above string, cc3zo7s is the username and 2497161 is the password that you need to use.

Note, that if you enter a phone number that already exists in the database (eg: one of the tech support numbers on the login page), you'll get this instead:

Duplicate entry '1271179237' for key 'PRIMARY'

Just try a different phone number. Oh, and what's with the semi-colon at the end of the SQL statement?

Lastly, don't bother sending them feedback. It doesn't go anywhere. And I don't mean that it goes into some mailbox that no one reads. I mean it goes nowhere. This is the page you get when you try to send feedback:



The interesting text in there is:

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at
 "ezcommindia.com" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in
 php.ini or use ini_set() in C:\xampp\htdocs\ezcomm\ifeedback.php
 on line 225

Yup, real classy. I think we can just start from the end of that message and stop when we get to C:\. It explains a lot.

This login manager isn't just broken, it goes right through broken and comes out on the other end.