Apple computers cannot connect through captive portal.

edanpedragosa · Feb 1, 2012, 7:28 AM

For some strange reasons, any apple computers e.g. imac, macbook pro, ipad, etc
cannot connect through the wireless with captive portal?

Other laptops, android devices, and other mobile devices can connect just fine.

The apple devices can get an IP from the dhcp server but has no internet joy. It also cannot see the logon page as the other laptop and devices can.

Any hint on this?

Thanks!

wallabybob · Feb 1, 2012, 10:55 PM

What does the browser report when you try to access a page?

dhatz · Feb 2, 2012, 2:56 AM

It's hard to diagnose what your exact problem is without more information, but I would guess it might be related to Apple's new Wifi auto-login feature (you can find out more by searching for http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html )

In that case, a possible solution would be to add www.apple.com to your CP's walled garden (note: if you're using ssl login, depending on your certs you may need to also add OCSP URLs). An alternative I tried was to hack pfsense's lighttpd conf to intercept and respond appropriately.

sylvester · Feb 17, 2012, 1:39 AM

@dhatz:

An alternative I tried was to hack pfsense's lighttpd conf to intercept and respond appropriately.

Can you give more details on this hack?

iMouse · Feb 17, 2012, 2:55 AM

My pfSense 2.01 captive portal serves several Apple devices on a daily basis. Mostly iOS devices connect, but I'm primarily a Mac user and configured everything using two Macs.

I know it doesn't really help your issue, but confirms this issue isn't across the board on all Apple / pfSense captive portal setups.

iMouse · Feb 17, 2012, 3:04 AM

I should note that under the Allowed IP Addresses tab in the Captive Portal setup, I added both of my DNS servers (OpenDNS). I know the iOS devices aren't typically happy unless they see a DNS server in addition to the IP and gateway they are assigned from the DHCP server.

kloon · May 4, 2012, 2:10 AM

I am having the same problem. I just apply a external SSL certificate to the captive portal. Most devices like android tablet, iphone, ipad, win 7 based notebook have no problem to access to the captive portal and login.

But Macbook able to connect to the wifi network, able to obtain IP from DHCP, but the captive portal page won't load.

Any idea how to solve this?

kloon · May 10, 2012, 12:56 AM

I found the problem. It's due to security fixed on Mac OS 10.7.2 that require to check the certificate revocation list before load any https page. One of the solution is to bypass the the IP address of the CRL and OCSP of the certificate issuer in captive portal.