EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android

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EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android

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EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android
EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android
2018-09-02 13:26:48

I set up an external captive portal on my EAP245. It is working correctly on iPhone, but on Android devices it is not popping up the captive portal. As a result; they are not verified by our Radius server, they do not have access to the internet. But there's no possibility to get access to internet too as the captive portal is not shown.

 

I tried it on two different Android devices.

 

My settings are (please let me know if other screenshots are needed to give an answer);

5GHz is the same as 2.4GHz.

 

IP and URLs are correctly set. I also tried enabling 'HTTPS redirect'.

 

Line 1 is set to the IP address of the Radius server. Line 2 is set to the same value as 'External web portal URL' of screenshot 2. Line 3 is set to the IP address of the webserver where the web portal is located. Line 3 was needed to get it working on iPhone too (I really don't know why). Our portal server is showing a HTML page with CSS inline and all images as inline base64 encoded values.

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#1
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Re: EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android
2018-09-02 16:55:51 - last edited 2018-09-02 20:40:02

No access point from any vendor can "show a captive portal" on a client device by itself. The WWW is a pull-medium, not a push-medium. As long as the user (or its device) doesn't request a web page, nothing will be sent from the web server.

 

What your iPhone does is a so-called network awareness test. If you connect the iPhone to a WiFi network, it will automatically send a HTTP request to an Apple server to see wether it has Internet access. If it gets a redirect to a portal page rather than the requested website as the answer, it will pull the portal page given in the redirect and display it.

 

An Android device does exacty the same — only difference is that it connects to a Google server for the test and that it does not immediately show the portal page being redirected to, but send a notification to the user requesting him/her to click on this notification to open the portal page (the message in the notification of following screenshot reads "Log into the WiFi network" in english):

 

 

 

Thus, showing no portal page on Android is error code 20cm, which means the problem sits 20cm in front of the screen.

It's not a setting in the AP or in the controller, it's just people not reading notifications (or turning them off intentionally).

 

BTW: to show a portal page on older systems without a network awareness test, just open a browser and request a web page of your choice using HTTP protocol (not HTTPS). The browser will redirect you to the portal page as long as you're not authenticated.

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Re:Re: EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android
2018-09-03 16:46:26

Thank you for your reply, R1D2.

 

I've never had an Android phone, so it's always a big search for me to find out what's happening. Now I understand the working of a captive portal on Android.

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#3
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Re:Re:Re: EAP245 is not showing captive portal on Android
2018-09-03 18:56:20 - last edited 2018-09-03 19:13:38

Rik wrote

I've never had an Android phone, so it's always a big search for me to find out what's happening. Now I understand the working of a captive portal on Android.

 

You're welcome, Rik.

 

The funny thing is: on Chromium OS Google does it right and shows a portal page - like in iOS and MacOS - by starting the Chrome browser automatically. They even suspend loading tabs in an already running Chrome browser until the user did login, which is an useful improvement.

 

But in Android they just send a notification. And they send so much notifications the whole day that many users tend to just ignore them. I did file a feature request to have this behavior changed to the Android developer forum years ago already, but no reaction.

 

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