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On Wed, 12 Jun 2013, Mark Evans wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 12/06/13 22:20, Gordon Henderson wrote:Most of the third party tools do it the same way. At least that's what I found when searching about it. Apple broke lots and lots of captive portals overnight and everyone was scrabbling round to "fix" them just to please the iDevice junkies.I'm not aware of any published standard for "captive portals". Or any IPV4 "host authentication" mechanism, However "transparent proxying" is rather difficult without breaking RFC791 sometimes additionally performing a "Man in the Middle" attack. Is Apple really to blame if they make changes which result in what is basically a "hack" failing?
Yes. I blame Apple. Something that was working stopped working once Apple released their iDevices to the world.
But you're right - there are no standard for captive portals, but in all the ones I've used, I've only seen 2 ways it's accomplished - one uses DNS to direct all web requests to an internal page and the other force re-directs web traffic.
The force redirect is more efective in my experience - and I've designed systems that use both.
The Apple issue is when you redirect to an internal page - that's fine, but if you then have a 2nd page - ie. hit submit on the first page, if the iDevice thinks its still not connected to the internet, it will reset the connection, terminate the browser, and (I think) drop its IP address and ask for a new one.
My original portals drop page had 2 buttons: "Signup", and "Login". I had to change that to one larger page with the login & password fields present, and the signup information on the same page. I looked at thwarting the DNS too to make the iDevice think it's connected, but for the last one I did, found that the one-page solution was acceptible.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq