problem with wifi in hotel

Hey guys, I am staying in a hotel room for about a week and I have a wireless router that I would like to use because I have and xbox 360, and two laptops that I will be using with my family. There is one ethernet cable coming out of the wall and I used that to plug into my router. I however am not able to connect to the internet unless I use a cable from the router to my computer. I am not very good at fixing internet issues so I really need help. I would enter the password for the router and it would say that I can't connect to the network or whatever...

 

You're putting a router on a network that already has a router.

Firstly - when you plug into the computer and open your web browser, do you have to log into anything, or is that it? You're just online.

If you have to enter something - sorry, you're screwed unless you can put two NICs into one of those computers and bridge the connection, then hook the router up to that. I'm not going to go into details even unless you have the hardware available for this, which I highly doubt.

If you're just online, no questions - this is easy. Just plug the ethernet cable into one of the ports on the back of the router that is NOT the "internet" port (the port separate from the other four). This will make the router simply function as a switch - it will not attempt to distribute IP addresses or anything, which was probably what was causing the problem. Before you plug in the router to the wall, on the computer attached to the ethernet cable from the wall, do start > run > cmd and type ipconfig /all
Under Local Area Connection, or whatever the name of your wired connection is, take note of the IP address. It's likely 192.168.x.x or 10.10.x.x
Then log into the router (make sure it's just connected to your computer, nothing else) and change the IP address of the router to be on a different range than the IP address if you noted. So if you have a 192.168 address, make the router 10.10.0.1. If you have a 10.10 address, make the router 192.168.0.1. And if you're so unfortunate that your router does not let you change the first two sets of the IP address, aim high (so set it to like 192.168.254.254, and then use this address for local management). Once that's all set up, put the ethernet cable from the wall into the switch on the router, and the other devices into the switch on the router, and you should be set.

This post seems kind of rambling, feel free to ask for clarifications on anything.

 

So try logging into your Router w/ the ethernet cable connected to the computer and connected to the network. Do a Start-->Run and type cmd and hit enter. Then type ipconfig /all and hit enter. The Default Gateway is the IP Address of your Router; Enter that IP Address in your Web Browser, log into the Router and disable the WEP/WPA security and try connecting again w/ out a password.

And you may need to set up the Router in Access Point (AP) Mode. Seeing that there's a possibility that another Router on the Hotel's network may be distributing IP Addresses; this would conflict w/ your Router because yours would be trying to distribute IP's as well. Setting it up in AP Mode would solve this issue.

 

You should also check with the hotel's IT person to make sure you have permission to add a wireless router to their network. Network admins do not like it when someone adds an unauthorized piece of hardware to their network - especially unauthorized access points - and the network may be set up so that it simply refuses to work with a device that it does not recognize.