TIL: What to Do If a Beryl AX Can’t Connect to a Wi-Fi

I’m absolutely in love with my GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX), but occasionally, it has trouble connecting to captive portal Wi-Fis.

The symptoms: the device reports that the network is not connected to the internet but won’t show me a captive portal – or it fails to get a local IP address in the first place. Meanwhile, connecting by phone or notebook works flawlessly.

As usual, the solution was hiding in a support forum¹: especially when connecting to UniFi access points, you must try out different MAC addresses:

Go into the “Network” submenu and find “MAC address”. Set it to “Manual” and click on “Random”. If it doesn’t help, try again.

Since employing this weird little trick, I could connect to any Wi-Fi without problems.

And if you can’t remember the name of some non-HTTPS website to trigger captive portals without certificate alerts, like yours truly, here’s mine: http://p.ox.cx/ (or http://notls.ox.cx/)

Bonus Tips

1. I’ve had the problem that, occasionally, no new WiFis have been shown with firmware 4.5.16 – in other words I arrived in hotels and couldn’t connect to anything. Updating to 4.6.2 (beta!) seems to have fixed it. 🤞

2. Use a private browser window for captive portals. Sometimes, they get confused by their own cookies.

3. Be careful with Beryl’s DNS overrides and rebind protection which can also interact poorly with captive portals. If you want privacy, use a VPN after connecting successfully.

4. If you play with any of the device’s Wi-Fi settings and run into connectivity problems (for example, the repeater just deactivating itself all the time), try rebooting the device before you spend too much time troubleshooting.

Addendum: A Love Letter to the Beryl AX

I’m so in love with this device that if you have yet to hear of it, here’s the spiel: It’s a tiny USB-C-powered travel router that gives you Internet via Wi-Fi 6. As of writing it’s 84 € in GL-iNet’s EU web shop, 119 € on Amazon.de and $109 on Amazon.com (not affiliate links because I’m an idealistic idiot).

What does it take the Internet from? Everywhere! It can work as a Wi-Fi repeater as described above: you arrive at a hotel, set it up once (including captive portal bullshit), and all your devices have Internet without configuring anything. Have you ever had a room with good Wi-Fi only in one corner? Put it there and your whole room has amazing Wi-Fi.

But you can also attach it to Ethernet (there might be unofficial Ethernet in your room – check the back of your TV ), to your phone for tethering, or a cellular modem.

Then there are tons of other features like attached USB storage being exposed as SMB drives, support for OpenVPN and WireGuard (both as a client and as a server), and even Tor support! Did I mention Tailscale!? It’s incredible what that little box is offering.

You have to believe me, I don’t receive any kickback – I just found it life-changing when traveling and need to share.