IPad and Captive Portal - Simply hangs on login

capnsteve

My setup:
pfSense is being used as a Gateway for our wireless network. We use the captive portal with RADIUS set up to do authentication against Active Directory.

The problem:
iPads, upon connecting to the wireless will bring up the login page automatically. However, it is not brought up in Safari, but some other form of stripped down browser-like interface. It will allow input of the username and password, but when "Submit" is hit, it actually locks the screen entirely and you have to hit the home button to get out. I once managed, through some rapid menu moving to get it to display the captive portal in Safari, and worked without issue for login. So I know it is not the captive portal, necessarily, but something about the stripped-down interface that comes up for the login.

What I've done:
1 - We had a browser redirect to our University's homepage. That has been removed as I worried the redirect in something that isn't a full browser would throw it off. Didn't work
2 - Checked - it is receiving a DHCP lease and pfSense sees the machien properly.
3 - Credentials are never passed, I see nothing in the logs concerning the username/password hitting anything.

I know this is probably an iPad problem and not a pfSense problem. However, with these devices sure to come hitting hard against our network setups in the coming months (or currently) I wanted to see if anyone else had a problem similar and/or if anyone had a solution.

capnsteve

Solution:

Disable URL redirection and clear the iPad's caches. Rebooted both devices and it started working. Will have to test on a second iPad when one comes around.

Wireless_guy

Had this problem too. Here's a solution that fixes it: http://teckhnologia.blogspot.com/2010/06/captive-portal-problems-with-ipad.html

jimp

Thanks for the link and research. I've added this to our Doc Wiki:

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Captive_Portal_hangs_with_iPad_client

capnsteve

I got frustrated and started changing settings all over the place on the iPad as well as the pfSense side. I guess its possible I disabled the setting and wasn't aware, as the iPad is now working with redirection turned back on.