General Questions

Hi guys,
I have a question about Captive portal, i have upgraded to 1.3b15 and i
can see strange behavior according to idle timeout.

During the weekend i have played with Captive portal using my Notebook. CP is set up correctly - i was browsing the i-net etc.

That notebook is disconnected (switched off) from the network over 30hours in this moment but when i open Captive portal status page from another remote PC i can see my Notebooks IP and MAC still listed, but my Idle timeout is set to 20minutes, so i'm expecting all records/logs to be removed from the list after 20min of inactivity.

IP address      MAC address     Session start    Last activity
192.168.100.153 00:xx:..   01/18/2009 04:44:45  01/18/2009 04:48:01

Is my expectation right?

Thank you, Peter
----
I'm using m0n0wall from 2004! Its great!

Here are some more infos :
I have started Captive Portal on 01/18/2009 04:44:45, browsing the net
~3minutes and than my notebook was disconnected from the network over
30hours. Idle timeout is set to 20minutes but my notebook was still
listed in the Captive Portal status page after 30hours of inactivity.

This morning I have connected my notebook back to the network and
browsing the net couple of minutes and definitely new session started
but in the status page i can see still same start time 01/18/2009
04:44:45 which is not reflecting reality. Last activity time is
updated correctly.

There can be two explanations:
1, this is wanted behavior, but i'm loosing whats the benefit if only
first "session start" logged and Idle timeout selected
2, this is a bug

Regards, Peter

Are you using M0n0wall "local user manager" for user accounts or No authentication? 

Users/computers with "Pass-through MAC" (second tab) entries don't time out.

Hi, thank you for the answer.
I'm using  Pass-through MAC and local user management. Its kind of MAC address access control - If MAC doesn't match, Captive Portal page is sent to user with information to contact network admin to get the access. In case user know the name and password defined in the user management page he can connect to the internet.

It looks to me like a bug especially because idle timeout is defined for session, but captive portal is still keeping start time same as it was when first session was opened.

Do you know whats the reason to have this behavior if its not the bug?

Thank you, Peter

While, I'm not using the beta, but I know exactly what all of you are talking about.

The Captive Portal has a built in User Manager, that for some reason, will do exactly what you everyone here has mentioned.  Such as "ghost activity" from a turned off machine, etc.  I don't know what the source of the problem is, but I can say that for some reason a Radius server bypasses the issue.

The inactive timer seems to function as it should when using Radius for authentication, but seems to be buggy for the built in User Manager. When I switched to a Radius server, inactivity timers and what not worked like they should.  I never had anymore of the "ghost" users.