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    Captive Portal MACs not working as of 1/1/2017

    Captive Portal
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    • D
      doktornotor Banned
      last edited by

      I'd blame the leap second. :P

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        h2professor
        last edited by

        You mean the stupid physicists who want the sun to be exactly overhead at noon are to blame??  OFF with their HEADS!!

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          PaulRockfield
          last edited by

          Hi h2professor,
          I am very new to pfsense and have taken over a customer who is having the same issues as you describe. is it a case of importing the .xml file? Do I assume correct that all MAC's will need to be re-entered as they have similar numbers?

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            h2professor
            last edited by

            Here is what I did. It's actually in my reply above, but I'll break it down into steps.

            1. Download a full configuration backup of the router. (debugging/backup/all)
            2. Be sure to go through every page of the configuration and print/write down/screen capture the configuration so you can go back and enter it again.
            3. Wipe the configuration clean and reinstall pfSense.
            4. Assign IP addresses to the ports and verify basic connectivity to the Internet, then allow pfSense to detect and install the latest version.
            5. Using the downloaded configuration from step 1, use the debug/restore and restore only Aliases, Captive Portal, NAT and Rules
            6. Go through every page of the config and enter the configuration manually that you kept in step 2.

            These are the steps I took to get mine working again, and it's still working.
            Best of luck to you.

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              h2professor
              last edited by

              If you are able, please post your saved (broken) configuration to a message here. I would really be curious to compare yours with mine.

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              • H
                h2professor
                last edited by

                Well here's a new twist. This morning (specifically, exactly at midnight between Jan 17 and Jan 18) the captive portal reverted to ignoring the MAC address bypass list again. !!?!

                On a whim I decided to upgrade to the latest development snapshot, because what the hell, I would have to reinstall anyway. So I'm running on 2.3.3-DEVELOPMENT (amd64) built Tuesday Jan 10

                And it worked! Problem gone.

                So I would assert that the MAC address bypass in version 2.3.2-RELEASE-p1 has a bug that is fixed in the latest development snapshot. I just hope it doesn't blow up on me, but it's currently working just fine. (I like the new look, too.)

                So pfSense developers, I'm your biggest fan now.

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                • P
                  PaulRockfield
                  last edited by

                  Thanks h2professor for the update as I too was having similar after re-installing. I have updated to the latest development build as per your post and hopefully have no further issues.

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                  • P
                    PaulRockfield
                    last edited by

                    Hi h2professor, just wondering if your captive portal is still working as mine has reverted back to allowing access ignoring MAC addresses.

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                      h2professor
                      last edited by

                      I have not had any further problems now that I upgraded to a development version.

                      So just to clarify, in your situation it is allowing access to systems that are not listed in the MAC bypass list?

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                        PaulRockfield
                        last edited by

                        Yes, it is allowing any system to access that is not in the MAC bypass list

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                        • H
                          h2professor
                          last edited by

                          Your problem is completely opposite from the problem we were having. In our case nobody was getting through. In your case everyone is getting through. Be sure to check the settings on the Captive Portal Configuration, especially the two "Enable pass-through MAC automatic addition" checkboxes.

                          Upgrading to a development release ended up being the solution to our problem, but since yours is completely opposite, there's no way for me to say that would work in your situation.

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                            PaulRockfield
                            last edited by

                            Thanks h2professor. Back to the drawing board so.

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                              h2professor
                              last edited by

                              To whomever is tracking this issue, we upgraded to 2.3.3-RELEASE (amd64) and we continue to operate without problems. Just because I was curious, however, I reinstalled the older 2.3.2 version on the backup router and restored the configuration that was attached in this forum and it does revert to ignoring the MAC bypass list, but then I upgrade it to 2.3.3 and once again the problem went away. So congratulations on the new version, and thank you very much for your excellent work.

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                                h2professor
                                last edited by

                                This morning at 4:00am sharp the router rebooted for no apparent reason (no error in the logs) and it is back to ignoring the MAC address bypass list in the Captive Portal settings just like it did back on January 1 of this year (hence the bump of this topic, because all of the conditions are the same).

                                I've had to turn off Captive Portal to prevent denying access to the Internet for all of the workstations on the network. Current version 2.3.4-RELEASE-p1. Rebooting the router again didn't solve the problem. No configuration changes have been made this week. The router has been rebooted a number of times without this problem. Etc etc.

                                System configuration AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core 4.2 GHz with Intel Quad Gigabit Ethernet card, dual HGST hard drives, 8G RAM (barely used), etc etc about 300 workstations to dual upstream gigabit Ethernet WAN. All overkill.

                                I was already planning to upgrade to 2.4 this weekend, so we'll see if that fixes the problem.

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                                  h2professor
                                  last edited by

                                  Upgrading to 2.4.0.RC solved the problem. Captive portal now recognizing the MAC bypass list.

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