Blagging from a traaain

One of my favourite means of travel is by train. This is unfortunate because I don’t live in a city (or even country) that is redolent with train travel. It’s possible to travel by train from Perth to Adelaide and the other eastern cities, but it’s an expensive tourist experience and just not feasible for business travel. So whenever I visit Europe, I get around by train as much as possible.

I’m one hour into a trip from Prague to Salzburg. The seats are comfortable, a nice person has brought me a beverage, and I get to watch the Czech countryside slide by while someone else drives.

I’m also playing with my little GL.iNet GL-MT1300 “Beryl” travel router. It’s connected to the in-train wifi and is rebroadcasting a wifi network that my devices will happily connect to.

It saves the hassle of having to set up each and every device I own with a new network and going through the captive portal to accept the terms and conditions.

The router is also capable of using a VPN to set up a secure tunnel for all my devices - the train wifi is unencrypted. Unfortunately I’m not great at networking and I can’t get the secure tunnel working. I don’t even know what tools to use to diagnose the issue. All I know that traffic just doesn’t get through when the tunnel is enabled.

What I can do, at least, is set up each of my client devices (phone, laptop) with a VPN.

One day I might have the time to learn more about networking and routing, and will be able to be in travel router nirvana.