I don’t know if it’s the same on iOS4 as I don’t have a device to test it, but I have seen this problem with all captive portals on the iPad. It is still a problem for every iPad that encounters a captive portal. I’ve tested this extensively on mikrotik hotspot and wifidog.
Thanks cobianet for your comment and excellent Blog.
Your conclusion is to “disable Autofill for Names and passwords”.. I will try and get an iPhone with iOS v4 to see if I can reproduce / solve the problem with your suggestion.
Anyone that has one and wishes to experiment then please feel free to contribute to this thread. Many hands make light work
Interesting.. Can you re-test on non beta version of MT?
Also do you have disable Autofill for Names and passwords turned off on iPhone as per blog above.
I think this might be the reason. I use these in restaurant environments where you force people to the restaurants web page or to a specials page, etc. so it goes to their webpage in an iframe with a button at the top “WiFi, Click to connect” and then it goes to the login page. So the phone cant auto-login.
I have had the same issue on 3 different sites using different versions of MT OS.
It worked fine with the 3gs pre os upgrade to OS 4 we had noticed theat some users could not use their IPOD touches
or some MAC airbooks ( I do not have exact OS version numbers).
It turned out to be when we removed the DNS Name from the Hotspot profile it would redirect to the login page without a problem.
This is specifically if the DNS Name in the Hotspot profile uses the .local suffix only.
Anyone else who can test this would be great and confirm.
Cheers
Yes I have also confirmed this with my iOS4 iPhone.
It only works if i remove the dns name. It looks like it uses apple.com as the default dns server and tries to look it up.
Has anyone found a way around it? I also noticed that when you select the specific hotspot you want to connect to, the wifi icon on the iPhone doesn’t show, so when you have a walled garden it actually access the web via the internet mobile and NOT the hotspot.
we have tested with different iPhones and an iPad, we don’t see any hotspot page issues. Are you using a customized page? Which RouterOS versions have you tested?
It turns out that it is due to the Auto-login feature of the iPhone OS3.x and above. Otherwise know as CNS.
“With OS3.0, Apple introduced a new auto-login feature for wireless networks. When you join a network, the OS tries to to fetch a test page (specifically, this one). If it gets something other than the expected test data (like a school or hotspot login page), a view pops up showing the login page. The view has a Cancel button on it, but if you click on it, the phone DISCONNECTS you from the network.”
For some reason the iPhone and iPad won’t resolve the dns-name of the hot spot properly, so don’t set it and it will use the IP instead.
The next trick is to allow http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html in the walled-garden. If IOS can’t see that URL, it pops up the annoying login screen. The user can then go run a browser on the device and will be presented with the hotspot login screen.
This is of course a workaround. The proper way to do it is to figure out what the little login popup screen wants to see as a signal that the user was authenticated, but I haven’t been able to figure that one out yet.