Hey Community,
I am running into a positive fault with Social WiFi logins. When a device connects to a public network with Captive Portal, they are able login through a splash page and the choices of authentication. The running configuration for these public networks have been capturing every single login and session, even though these devices could be authenticating the same way (could be the same Facebook or email, etc). Now, when a device connects, Captive Portal simply allows that device to authenticate and connect without prompting its splash page. I do remember conversing with Peplink’s Michael Chan. He told me that Captive Portal basically operates within a 24-hour window between set Quotas. However, the devices used to test with are the same every time and are only logging on Captive Portal every 48 hours just to be sure set Quotas do not interfere with testing data and the devices are simply connecting without being prompted Captive Portal’s sign-in page.
This particular configuration in subject is used throughout my company’s customers, however, I am only experiencing this at one client-site and within our own office infrastructure. Could it be as simply as upgrading these routers and WAPs to recent firmware? we are currently running v6.3.3 for balance-one’s and v6.5.3 for AP-One’s.
We recently applied an enhancement (or you may consider it as a bug fix). I am not sure if it is the cause of the change you experienced. Here is the change.
Assuming a user signed in with a daily quota. Before the usage quota has reached, the user disconnected from the Wi-Fi for more than X mins of “session timeout” time. Then the system will auto sign out the user. If the user reconnected, previously the user would be redirected to the splash page for signing in again. But now the system will auto sign in and resume the session for the user. No splash page will be seen.
If the user’s daily usage quota has exceeded, the system will still not auto sign in for the user. The daily quota still applies.
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Thank you for getting back to me,
I believe that I actually utilize the enhancement you stated. I set the configuration to disconnect and redirect right after the user reaches its session time limit. That’s why I began to consider maybe outdated firmware. Could it be anything else?
You’ve set a very long Session Timeout time (60 mins). It means users will still be counted as signed in even they have disconnected for 59 mins. I’d suggest you to change it to 5 mins or even shorter. Then you should expect your users won’t be prompted to sign in within 60 mins of effective usage time (note: when a user disconnected, the timer will stop counting.) After 60 mins, users will have to sign in again to get Internet access. If it is not what you/your users experience, let us know.
BTW, we are going to remove the session timeout setting in the next IC2 release. We will make the timeout very short (e.g. 30 secs). It is because the longer the session timeout value is, the larger error in time/bandwidth quota measuring will be introduced. But as the system will do auto sign-in as stated previously, so it will not affect the user experience.
Lastly I’d suggest you to upgrade your Balance One to firmware 7 if possible. Some captive portal related issues have been addressed.
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