Thank you very much for this detailed answer. I appreciated very much your explanation of the redirecting technique.
@Gertjan said in Captive Portal redirect does not work for a few clients:
First things first : you have this package installed, and activated the patches :
[image: 1686729786540-05481e7a-0815-410a-93dd-d28cd13e58ed-image.png]
Btw : you might want to use 2.7.0-beta, is close to release.
This package indeed needs an update. Will do so this evening.
We won't use a beta version in this production environment. But we have a Dev cluster and will check this on that.
The solution is always the same : Delete the wifi profile on the phone - it doesn't contain any user settings as a password (portal networks don't use password - they use a TLS connection to authentify against the portal web server, and from then on all connection are TLS anyway[ok, except DNS]) - and re connect.
It always works for me.
Yes, this also worked for our test client!
You mean pfSense can't see the MAC addresses of the connected captive portal users ?
Exactly
You didn't mention the most important criteria of a portal : DNS.
A connecting device should obtain an IP, network, gateway and DNS.
Then it throws out a hidden http request (see above) and for that to work, DNS should work.
Not some "8.8.8.8" DNS, as all non local DNS are not accessible at this moment. By default, the DNS will work on the pfSense portal interface.
Did you test that ?
Yes, DNS works good on the inside interface of the pfsense, with host override for the portal page redirect.
In the past, this page Troubleshooting Captive Portal was mandatory.
It still is, but these days it talk about the new firewall 'pf', as Netgate made 'pf' MAC aware.
2.6.0. uses ipfw, which was ditched after 2.6.0.
I am aware of this page, thank you. The problem is also with troubleshooting in the Prod environment. I cannot change some settings just to test if it works. There would be the risk to interrupt the connectivity of the 300-400 working clients. I have to do non-invasive things like packet capture and log examination.
If this issue remains or even spreads to more clients or the "Wifi forget" on the phone won't help anymore we would need to reproduce the setting in a testing environment.
Again thank you
R.