I think you can use radius. It'll help you anyway.

What i was looking for is to dynamically switch the user from not having a working network at all except for connectivity to just the captive portal to having full network use and internet use once they pay and i accept them.

There isn't much to the question. I'm running 1.2.2. I create firewall rules allowing ports through the firewall to IPs in the private network. These rules don't work unless those IPs are in the bypass list for the captive portal. I would like the rules to work without bypassing the captive portal. I will try the RC in future but would prioritise that task if this issue is no longer evident.

It should be fairly easy to replace the main router with a pfsense box running CP. I would recommend a recent 1.2.3 snapshot, as there have been many CP improvements since 1.2.2. Personally, I'd go with an Alix running nano on a good CF card for reliability and low power use.

on the cp page: If you provide a URL here, clients will be redirected to that URL instead of the one they initially tried to access after they've authenticated. so no, however you can make it so that they can access that page without having to login, this is under allowed ip addresses: Note: Adding allowed IP addresses will allow IP access to/from these addresses through the captive portal without being taken to the portal page. This can be used for a web server serving images for the portal page or a DNS server on another network, for example. By specifying from addresses, it may be used to always allow pass-through access from a client behind the captive portal.

Reinstall pf after backing up the config file. I had this happen where pf would not do self signed certs so i reinstalled and it fixed it, then i uploaded my config file and all settings were back.

thank you so much…

As helpful as that is, I've looked through it before. A little hint would be nice that I can run with.

CP is now working on 1.2.3 snapshot 9-22-09  ;D here is a link to the snapshots http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_7_2/pfSense_RELENG_1_2/livecd_installer/

Ok so I've found another opensource App called CoovaChilli that supports the external Web/Portal Page.  This is the exact functionality I would like to see in PFSense… am I the only one?

You're correct. I apologise for wasting your time. Textedit on the Mac when you save with a .html extension adds all that guff. I've moved back to vi and it works as it should.

@cmb: To anyone who runs into this problem in the future, you can use Diagnostics -> Edit file to open /etc/inc/pkg-utils.inc and towards the top of that file you will see several require_once lines. Add this line with the ones that are there: require_once("config.inc"); then save the changes and that will fix it. Once the next official 1.2.3-RC, or shortly after 1.2.3 release is out, you'll want to re-flash with the new nanobsd embedded, which will also fix the problem. Current snapshots also do not have this problem, some that shipped from Netgate with images we provided them. Thank you CMB.  That indeed did fix my errors on the CP page. Looking forward to 1.2.3 stable but this RC seems to be now working for me well. Thanks again. J.

Add the POP3/SMTP to the passthrough.

I'm currently working on a solution for this…  From what I can see, it should be possible. I'm going through captiveportal.inc right now and figuring out the best way to do it... i'm happy to post whatever code I come up with. If anyone else has ideas or can provide some insight into how it works currently... I would love to hear from you.

update to 1.2.2?? are you useing pfsense of a live cd or do you have it installed on your hard drive?? :-\