Automatically Login to wifi.free.fr Wifi

on Linux, Tricks, Opensuse

The not so expansive French mobile phone operator free.fr offers some nice extras for their clients. People can use the free.fr hotspots, which you can find at many places in French cities. Unfortunately you have to login manually using the gateway page https://wifi.free.fr/ for every wifi reconnect. Ähm – do you really have to? :wink:

I’m one of these lucky guys who can actually receive this hotspot in the own flat. So why should I pay extra for cable internet?

To still have some selling points for ADSL customers free.fr doesn’t make it very convenient to use this free wifi. The network comes without any security modes like WPA/WPA2/WAP, but requires you to authenticate yourself an a gateway page every time you reconnect to the network. There is only one other option which incorporates SIM card authentication which is not an option for most computers due to the lack of a SIM card.

So why not using curl to send automatically an POST request with your login data as soon as you got connected to the so-called “FreeWifi” network?

Using openSuSE 12.3 or any other Linux distribution based on NetworkManager you just place the following file freewifi-up in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d.

# file: 'freewifi-up'
#! /bin/sh
#
# auto login freewifi from free.fr
#
#
. /etc/rc.status

case "$2" in
    up)
        if iwgetid | grep -qs :\"FreeWifi\"; then
                curl -s --retry 10 --retry-max-time 0 -X POST -d 'login=000000000&password=mypassword&submit=Valider' https://wifi.free.fr/Auth > /dev/null
        fi
        ;;
    *)
        exit 0
        ;;
esac

The actual name of the file is not very important. But pay attention to set the appropriate file rights chmod 755 freewifi-up. Of course, you have to replace the login number and the password by your own.

The script will be run by networkmanager automatically when the connection status get changed. Only if a connection was setup the wifi SSID will be checked to be FreeWifi. Only In this case an authentication request will be send to the gateway webpage.