Connecting to the inflight internet on Emirates' flights

It would really be hard for you to find this article useful because you probably won’t have internet to read this…

…but I’m going to share this anyhow, since I think the approach might get you away with it in other occasions.

Once connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi network, I couldn’t connect to the usual login page from my browser — the browser hangs, the page keeps loading, the spinner keeps spinning, the wait keeps going…

I just gave a look at my syslog with the usual tail -50f /var/log/syslog to see that my internet gateway was 172.19.248.1:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   address 172.19.248.93
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   prefix 23 (255.255.254.0)
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   gateway 172.19.248.1
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   nameserver '8.8.8.8'
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   nameserver '8.8.4.4'
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   nameserver '172.19.248.1'
Feb 11 13:10:29 sunny NetworkManager[888]: <info>   domain name 'onboard'

Pasted that into the browser, and an HTML page suddenly appeared.