Crappy dns spoofs

I was in a Radisson hotel last week I experienced some strange behaviour on their access points. I booted up my laptop and the first thing I saw was an IP collision with my default preconfigured ip and the surrounding network. Off course there was no address already in use but upon booting I send out an arp request for my own ip address in order to figure out possible collisions. Somehow their environment sends a positive reply back. Strange :)

Next I tried to get an ip config via dhcp however failed to get an answer. Since their accesspoint replied to all my arp requests I figured out to set a random default gw. Upon realising that they transparently captured my outging traffic it took me a while till I got redirected to their authentication page.

Then I ran into my next problem, I could access hosts on ip basis but dns seemed to be completely disfunctional. I am running my own cachnig dns server on my laptop but somehow the answers that I got back were bogus. After configuring 2 random external dns server my luck changed. I assume they were doing some kind of dns dns spoofing but failing to do it correctly.

Yet another example of you ill configured services make life much more
difficult than it should be :)