Captive portal works...With a catch

Networking Networking Software
1

Hey, so I set everything up on my pfsense box, I have 3 interfaces WAN, LAN and guest. My Guest interface has a different subnet to my lan and a captive portal. It works perfectly when I connect my PC via cable to the Guest interface. The portal shows up fine(there's a bug actually that doesn't allow me to set "no authentication " but other than that it works) and I log in and browse.

However when I connect the GUEST interface into a router (lan port) with dhcp forwarder pointing pfsense, if I access my guest wifi the portal shows up fine too, but when I enter the right login credentials it redirects me to the portal screen again. My guess is that it is not allowing my wireless access point to access the portal acting as if the router was a client(which it is with a fixed ip) I added the router to the portals whitelist with confusing success, now the portal identifies my router and logs it in but the users connected to the router end up stuck in some sort of limbo on the login page where if you try to login it redirects you to a blank page. . So I'm stuck here, any help would be appreciated!

EDIT: in Status-->Captive Portal my access point appears as a logged in user instead of my phone (with the credentials I entered on my phone)

2

The second router that you're using as an AP, is that connected to the pfsense guest network on its wan interface or one of the lan ports?

You shouldn't need to use the dhcp forwarder, if you disable dhcp and just have the WiFi set up then all you should need to do is connect it to pfsense via a lan port and it should just work.

Although I haven't used captive portal before so maybe there's some weirdness going on.

1 Like
3

Yes that is correct, I tried only disabling DHCP and had the same result so it seems to be the same.

4

I solved it! it was the router I was using, I tried the same on another router running openWRT and now I get the user to log in! So there was definitely something wrong with that router.
Now however I get redirected to a 404 not found when I log in to captive portal but at least it works.