Cannot get past Captive Portal entry page with internet explorer
-
Hello forum!
I have the vexing problem that some clients using internet explorer cannot get past the captive portal entry page.
After entering the voucher code and pressing continue they get redirected to the portal page again and no error is shown. The only difference when compared to the captive portal page shown first, is that instead of the captive portal URL with the redirection address only the raw URL of the portal is shown.(http://<ip>:8000)The entered voucher code is not shown in the database as logged in and there is no error displayed to the user. With firefox there are no problems.
I noticed this problem most often with IE6 but also with IE8.
If I want those clients to access the internet at all, I have to enter their mac address in the pass through table and then -after some time has passed- they can enter the voucher code and surf.I thought that the pass through mac addresses could surf without entering a voucher code? Surfing Without entering a voucher code only works with the pass through IP addresses.
I am sorry that I cannot reproduce this problem reliably. IE6 is the worst offender and thankfully it will die out soon but the random occurrences with later IE versions worry me.
I am using 2.0-RC1 (i386) built on Thu Mar 3 17:43:05 EST 2011, but will update on Monday. #
Has anybody an explanation for IEs behaviour and maybe a workaround?
Cheers
Marcus</ip> -
Does the affected users have this issue 100%, or if they keep resubmitting the voucher code do they get in? You said you cannot reliably reproduce the issue, just wonder if it's an intermittent issue for 1 person, or it just varies from machine to machine.
If you have an affected user, have you tried running firefox portable on the same machine to see if it works? Maybe it's because the affected users are running an older version of java script?
-
If Java/Firefox are the only answers, maybe make a note on the portal page about the issue, and white-list access to mozilla/java's website.
Eh maybe scratch that, I don't see an option to whitelist. Hopefully you're not using a CF card and can spare the space to upload the needed files for the users, modify the portal page to give the user the chance to download the udpate/installer.
-
Resubmitting the voucher code does not help in a reasonable amount of time. After putting an IE8 machine in the mac-pass-through list and entering the voucher code so that the machine was accepted once, then logging off that machine and removing it from the mac-pass-through list, I suddenly could use IE8 to accept the voucher code, even though the computer was not on any pass-through list anymore.
The voucher-not-accepted-by-internet-explorer issue happened on several different windows xp machines from different people.
I'll try to find a reproducible scenario.Your second suggestion of offering the firefox installer is not quite feasible, because some of the people have no individual control over their computer. (They have laptops supplied by their company. And since I can work around the problem by adding them to the ip pass-through list it is not quite necessary. It's just more work for me. :-) But it's such a curios problem, just IE being affected, etc.)
-
I feel silly now.
Pfsense is totally fine with all versions of internet explorer. I just ran into the rejected issue http://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/1346.
Sending the voucher code with a simple keypress of <enter>results in the reloading of the captive portal entry page but klicking on the "continue" button works fine. ::)</enter>