I don't know what exactly your hotel guys said, but I expect once you're done with all the hassle, they will boldly advertise "Anyone visiting our hotel with a laptop will have instant Internet access". And then there come the problems. Imagine these cases:
During their bold advertisemnt, hotel forgets to mention you need a laptop with a NIC for this. Believe me, many people - especially manager folks - don't know this:-)
Laptop has NIC, but is usually used on an isolated network, i.e. has no default gateway, DNS-Server, whatever. The system wouldn't even try to resolve any names to ip addresses or ip addresses to mac addresses, it would just say "No"
If used on an isolated network, laptop might not have TCP/IP installed. There's quite a few old Novell IPX and MS NetBEUI installations out there. Or it might have a modem, which is usually used for Internet access, and has TCP/IP only bound to the Dial-Up Adapter, while the NIC has only IPX and/or NetBEUI.
Even if laptop has NIC and TCP/IP and a working browser etc., I myself have set up a number of networks where internet access is done via http-proxy. That means, the clients again don't have any default gateway or dns servers. The router/proxy/whatever you need to setup somehow needs to know that it has to play proxy server for these laptops. Others might be using a proxy accessible from the Internet as a gateway into their corporate network. How would you distinguish when to do transparent proxy and when not?
In short, I would try to explain that for reasons of security, simplicity and budget there is no reasonable solution at the moment. That's what I would do, at least;-)
I'm not sure here, but AFAIK Linux 2.4 supports more than 4GB RAM using Intels Physical Address Extension (PAE), which every PPro or newer should have.
I know this is a workaround, not a clean solution, but the problem is the 32bit architecture here, not Linux itself.
At least I'm sure I saw more than one announcement of a "linux monster" like this in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
In short, I would try to explain that for reasons of security, simplicity and budget there is no reasonable solution at the moment. That's what I would do, at least
I'm not sure here, but AFAIK Linux 2.4 supports more than 4GB RAM using Intels Physical Address Extension (PAE), which every PPro or newer should have.
I know this is a workaround, not a clean solution, but the problem is the 32bit architecture here, not Linux itself.
At least I'm sure I saw more than one announcement of a "linux monster" like this in the past.