Eye-Fi upload fix: how to get past hotel logins

Having been living in Shanghai for some time and travelling all over Asia, it finally occurred to me that I would be well served with a WiFi-enabled SD card in my Canon D100; Imagine! The wonderful convenience of having to never remove the SD card again, simply uploading pictures through the ether as I return from another adventure.

The beginning, middle, and end of all my problems.

Having been convinced of this glorious future, I convinced my buddy Lee to get one for via on Amazon and deliver it to me when he came to visit. I could barely contain my excitement when I finally got the SD card of my dreams.

However, actually setting it up turned out to be a lesson in frustration. It seems that despite the Eye-fi being marketed as an on-the-go device, wifi networks with splash pages are not supported. It even says so on their customer support page. This is certainly a problem when a huge majority of public places use splash screen like this:

And hotels would often have pages like this:

Basically, any page that forces you to login or click a button before giving you access will NOT work with the eye-fi cards.

Being frustrated won’t help, however; Afterall, my own home wifi uses a similar setup and right now I was about to admit I spent $60 on a glorified SD card unless I came up with a way to bypass this issue.

At the end the solution was quite simple; The answer was to simply spoof your computer’s MAC address, thereby whitelisting the SD card and allowing you to skip many of these pages when the SD card attempts to authenticate.

  1. Read up on MAC address spoofing – Each major operating system has a way to do it
  2. Locate your Eye-fi card’s MAC address; This is easy to find using the Eye-fi helper (Right click on the icon while the card is plugged in, and the MAC address of the card will show up.)
  3. Record your own PC’s MAC address; you’ll need that again shortly
  4. Spoof your PC to the MAC address of the Eye-fi card, then reconnect to the internet after going through the necessary splash screens.
  5. Return your PC’s MAC address to its original value, then complete setting up the Eye-fi card as normal.

Not a difficult fix, but requires a little know-how. Still believe that Eye-fi should do something about it (perhaps stream the web page request to the user via their application), but at least there’s some way to get around the issue.

 

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