Troubleshooting Captive Portal¶

The best source of captive portal troubleshooting information can be found in the pfSense Book.

Captive portal not redirecting¶

If clients are not being redirected to the portal page when attempting to browse on an interface with captive portal enabled, it’s most always one of the following causes:

DNS resolution not functioning: Clients on the captive portal interface must either be using the DNS resolver or forwarder on pfSense® software, on the IP address of the interface where the client resides (which is the default configuration), or if using another IP address for DNS, it must be in an allowed IP address entry. If DNS fails, the browser never issues the HTTP request, hence it cannot be intercepted and redirected.
Firewall rules on the captive portal interface do not allow the initial HTTP request: If the user is trying to browse to google.com, but HTTP connections are not allowed to google.com, the HTTP request will be blocked and hence cannot be redirected. Under Firewall > Rules, on the interface where captive portal is enabled, the traffic to be redirected must be allowed to pass. This is most commonly HTTP to any destination.
The client has an HTTPS home page: The request must be to an HTTP site in order for the portal to redirect the client. If HTTPS is enabled for the portal, this may still work but it depends upon the client browser or operating system automatic portal detection to work.

Captive Portal Rules Generation¶

Captive Portal is using ipfw under the hood. ipfw is a program performing packet filtering. When having issues with the captive portal, it is possible to list ipfw rules for debugging.

To list all ipfw rules, which includes rules for Captive Portal in general as well as zone specific tables, run:

# ipfw show

IPFW tables¶

Show all tables:

# ipfw table all list

The <name>_auth_up table holds authenticated/allowed clients for a zone. This table allow traffic from clients to enter the interface. For example, a zone called “myzone” would contain this table:

# ipfw table myzone_auth_up list

The <name>_auth_down table holds authenticated/allowed clients for a zone. This table allow traffic to clients to exit the interface. For example, a zone called “myzone” would contain this table:

# ipfw table myzone_auth_down list

See captiveportal.inc for information on other tables, these include tables for host/MAC bypass entries and other necessary controls.