I’m sitting in a hotel lobby and the Ubuntu Acer Nitro 5 won’t connect to the hotel wifi, although my android phone connected fine. According to syslog “could not get netmask from lease”. This post isn’t a fix, just an ugly workaround.
This “lease” message points the unacquainted me towards a DHCP issue, which is beyond me to debug. So I’m attempting to fiddle around with the wifi setting, eg disabling ipv4 or ipv6 (obviously not both) to no avail. So I’ll try to configure the laptop with a static IP.
I install and run network analyser on the phone which gives me the necessary details: netmask, a sample IP, DNS and IP gateways. So I pick the next “available” IP address and enter all the other values as they are on the phone:
I tried a network scan with net analyser to find an unused IP address, but the router blocks that.
Surprisingly enough, this configuration works. I sincerely apologise to the guest whose IP address I share tonight.
George's Techblog 