Captive Portal

Hi All

I have been pulling my hear out with the captive portal login page on some of the clients - Vista / IE8 / WinXP SP3. Problem is that sometimes it will work on a machine and on another machine it doesn't

The issue is that the login page is not being displayed when opening a browser, IE7-8 or Mozilla. If you hit refresh 2-5 times the page eventually comes up.

This is what I tried.

1. MTU - m0n0wall is connected directly to the DSL router and it uses DHCP, so no option to set MTU ;lower.
2. Change the form method to "<form method="post" action="">" as suggested in a earlier post.
3. Change MTU on workstation to in 8k decrements to 1300 and still no luck.
4. Disable Black hole router detection through registry, no joy.

Is there anything else I can try, I am using e100 Intel nic's on a AMD 64 2800+ platform.

Thanks in advance.

Hi All

I have been pulling my hear out with the captive portal login page on some of the clients - Vista / IE8 / WinXP SP3. Problem is that sometimes it will work on a machine and on another machine it doesn't

The issue is that the login page is not being displayed when opening a browser, IE7-8 or Mozilla. If you hit refresh 2-5 times the page eventually comes up.

This is what I tried.

1. MTU - m0n0wall is connected directly to the DSL router and it uses DHCP, so no option to set MTU ;lower.
2. Change the form method to "<form method="post" action="">" as suggested in a earlier post.
3. Change MTU on workstation to in 8k decrements to 1300 and still no luck.
4. Disable Black hole router detection through registry, no joy.

Is there anything else I can try, I am using e100 Intel nic's on a AMD 64 2800+ platform.

Thanks in advance.

Sounds like you are doing everything right, so the next question is.  How many max captive portal sessions do you have set? Sounds like it's hitting the default 16 limit either from a virus spamming machine or someone with a lot of machines.

Thx for the reply.

I had a look and under "Maximum concurrent connections" the values are all empty. So next I check the the firewall states for port 8000. Only one connection showed up.

I also rebooted m0n0wall and with nobody logged on I still experience the same problem...?

Is the a best practice value to set the "Maximum concurrent connections"...?

My feeling is there is something else that is causing this behavior on these clients.

Anything else I can try...?

Thx for the reply.

I had a look and under "Maximum concurrent connections" the values are all empty. So next I check the the firewall states for port 8000. Only one connection showed up.

I also rebooted m0n0wall and with nobody logged on I still experience the same problem...?

Is the a best practice value to set the "Maximum concurrent connections"...?

My feeling is there is something else that is causing this behavior on these clients.

Anything else I can try...?

Yeah, even the default has 16 set, you only saw 1 in the firewall states, so that rules out a virus spewing computer, next up is the network layout.

What type of setup do you have (2 or 3 NIC cards), how is each connected to the other, etc.

First the network layout.

The server has got two nic's. 1 x Intel e100 connected to WAN and 1x e100 connected to LAN


WAN-------m0n0wall-----{LAN - HUB(10/100)} -------Mikrotik RB400------Wirelesss-------WLAN Client

Hope this makes sense :-)

Ok the second thing I'm worried about is the Firewall States, when I checked last time there was only one entry in the firewall state, but, if you click refresh a few times, the states add up to 8 even more.

Now, my portal page load the style.css and 4x images directly of m0n0wall. it looks like the the portal page is creating a connection to port 8000 for each object.

I tested this theory and moved the style sheet and images to a web servers and removes all file from the portal file manager.

So now if I open up the portal page it only display one or two connections max in the firewall states. ( Also limit Max connections / IP = 2, total still blank = 16 )

I tested the amended configuration on one computer but the problem still persist. Then I tested on another computer and it was fine.

I'm confused now, not sure what to check next.

Thanks for all your help so far.

I am seeing this as well.  I believe it is related to the "Safe Browsing" options in so may tools.  (Like McAfee Site Advisor)  They are also no built into Windows and IE8.  I would love to start a catalog of these, so we could enumerate them in the allowed IPs.  In your case I bet it is waiting to time out on the check to see if http://192.168.1.1:8000 is considered clean.

I'm also seeing this too. But what happens is that my users are used to seeing this behavior, even in commercial captive portals, so they know that when they're having trouble with the login page, switch to Firefox and/or disable their personal firewalls.