How to connect Ubuntu 16.04 with @DB_bahn's WifiOnIce

README.md

HOWTO: wifionice.de on Ubuntu 16.04

My Ubuntu 16.04 did not work with @DB_Bahn's Wifi network out of the box. Here's what I did:

Step 1 Connect to the WLAN wifionice.

Step 2. Fire up your browser and open http://www.wifionice.de - at this point, I got an "unable to connect" message.

Step 3.. Open up a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T on Ubuntu) and find out the IP address of www.wifionice.de

$ host www.wifionice.de
wifionice.de has address 172.18.10.10

Step 4.. Confirm that the IP address (in my case it was 172.18.10.10, see above) is not reachable

$ ping -c 1 172.19.10.10
PING 172.19.10.10 (172.19.10.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 172.19.0.1 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

--- 172.19.10.10 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 0 received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss, time 0ms

Step 5.. Look at your routing table and try to find blockers. Mine looked like this:

$ route 
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         172.16.0.1      0.0.0.0         UG    600    0        0 wlan0
link-local      *               255.255.0.0     U     1000   0        0 br-42b83c0b858b
172.18.0.0      *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 br-eea55c5060c3

The last line says: route every IP starting with 172.18 through bridge br-eea55c5060c3. This is what blocked my connection to www.wifionice.de, whose IP address is 172.18.10.10, as we found out above.

Step 6.. Delete the offending bridge br-eea55c5060c3. You need root capabilities to do this, the sudo command might prompt you for your password.

> sudo ifconfig br-eea55c5060c3 down; sudo brctl delbr br-eea55c5060c3

Step 7.. Confirm everything is working. Then point your browser to http://172.18.10.10 (the IP address from step 3).

> ping -c 1 172.18.10.10
PING 172.18.10.10 (172.18.10.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.18.10.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=2.26 ms

--- 172.18.10.10 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.264/2.264/2.264/0.000 ms

Thanks! 🙏

My Ubuntu 20.04 doesn’t have a brctl command, but I could delete the bridge with sudo ip link delete br-eea55c5060c3. The “eea55c5060c3“ part of the bridge name is random, so yours might be called differently.

Thank you!

For me I could not even resolve wifionice.de, but the problem was the same.
Saw a bridge blocking 172.18.*.*, disabled it and the login page was accessible again.

In my case it was a network created by docker-compose.

Thank you so much!!! This saved my day <3

Thanks, also found, that the issue is related to docker & docker-compose setup 🙏

@JapuDCret thank you very much for the pointer regarding docker bridge network! I really thought it was a problem with my DNS config because the browser could not resolve wifionice.de. Again, thank you 👍