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    Automatically adding MAC addresses to Captive Portal

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Captive Portal
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    • L
      liontaur
      last edited by

      Hey folks,

      First off, keep up the great work on the project, I can't remember life before pfsense nor do I want to.

      So here's the question.

      I've got a pfsense box as the firewall for a hotel. It uses a captive portal with no authentication, just a page with an accept button on it.

      The hotel often gets guests from Canada Revenue (Canadian IRS). Their laptops for some reason do not show the captive portal page, i'm guessing it's something about not allowing redirects or who knows what.

      That means that I get a call everytime so that I can add the laptop's MAC to the Pass-through-MAC page so that the laptop doesn't have to go to the captive portal page.

      So i'm wondering if there's a way to add them automatically since Canada Revenue has a million laptops it seems. However each laptop seems to have a hostname that starts with the same characters (L950CP). Or I guess maybe figure out why their laptops can't get to the captive portal page but that would require the assistance of either the Canada Revenue person or their IT dept or both and so far they haven't seemed very willing to figure out why, they just want it to work.

      Perhaps running a tcpdump of what happens when they first connect to the network would help, but I don't happen to have that yet.

      Ideas? Suggestions?

      Thanks folks!

      Mark

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      • GruensFroeschliG
        GruensFroeschli
        last edited by

        They probably have a popup-blocker running.

        We do what we must, because we can.

        Asking questions the smart way: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

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        • S
          Still
          last edited by

          Did you add your internal/ISP DNS servers IPs to the captive portal "Allowed IP addresses" list?
          It happens when a client request an internet page and can't DNS resolve it, the CP loginpage won't show up.

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          • L
            liontaur
            last edited by

            @GruensFroeschli:

            They probably have a popup-blocker running.

            I don't think that's it as the CP doesn't use a pop-up AFAIK, plus I use a popup stopper and it works for me. Thanks though.

            @Still:

            Did you add your internal/ISP DNS servers IPs to the captive portal "Allowed IP addresses" list?
            It happens when a client request an internet page and can't DNS resolve it, the CP loginpage won't show up.

            I did not add them, but i'm going to right now, not sure when the next time I can test the theory out is as i'm not sure when Canada Revenue will be back but i'll backup and remove all the Pass-through MACs and i'll find out eventually if it works and let you know. Thanks for the tip, hopefully it solves the problem.

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