The login page no longer appears.

patbol

Hello,
I'm having a problem with my captive portal. When I first connect a PC to the network and start it up, I get the portal login window and I can browse the internet after authenticating. The problem is that when I close the browser or even shut down my PC, the portal login window no longer appears, but the PC remains connected to the internet. What settings should I check to get the login window after closing the browser or restarting my PC?
TY

johnpoz

@patbol why should the captive portal login show up again if you have internet?

Are you talking about the logout popup?

Gertjan

@patbol said in The login page no longer appears.:

but the PC remains connected to the internet

Because the session has been opened for 'some time'.
The session = the IP and MAC addresses of your PC are added to the 'pass' list of the portal's firewall.
pfSense GUI portal firewall still apply, but there in no need to re open a session already open.

Contact the admin of your portal, and ask him what this 'some time' is.
He can find it here :

At least of of these two has to be set to a positive value.
Hard time out means : after login, no matter what, the session will be destroyed after this delay. The user will / has to re authenticate again.
Idle time out means : after login, when the user leaves the portal, because he disconnected the cable or shut down his wifi or just went out of wifi range, the idle counter start to run. When idle, which means : no traffic what so ever from the device, the session will be destroyed. if the user comes back, he has to authenticate again.

If the user reconnects again (cable or wifi), DHCP will try to assign the same IP to this client again. If this is the case, knowing that the MAC is also the same, the device will find its session still valid if the Idle or hard time out didn't expire the session.
This explains why you are still connected to the portal even when you power down your device for a moments.

@johnpoz said in The login page no longer appears.:

Are you talking about the logout popup?

No one should be talking about browser popups'. Not one sane browser will allow popups these days anymore.
This options :

should be considered as 'dead and buried' a decade ago.

If the portal admin doesn't 'like' many stale portal sessions, then you should lower the Idle timeout to ... 10 minutes or so. For the young public, this will work just fine. Older public, who fall asleeep in front of their screen will have to login every 10 minutes again. Up to the portal admin to decide what the good value is.

Real smart portal (pfSense) admins will read and use this forum : Home > pfSense Software > Captive Portal where he will find what "RFC8910" is. (TIP : no AI needed, use the forum find function ) and when the admin implements this RFC8910 into the portal, all apple devices will now have a Logout button function. Microsoft Windows is about to implement it also as we speak (but they are to busy making Windows 11 the most broken OS on the planet right now).

edit : oh, nice, wi'll I'm replying to this thread it has been moved to the portal forum where it belongs .... pure AI magic ^^

patbol

Thank you for all these answers. We will look into this more closely.