Improve the Captive Portal Experience for Roaming Clients | Voters

Improve the Captive Portal Experience for Roaming Clients

developing (live in <90 days)

Vincent

Create a list of all hotel, airline, restaurant, free wifi hotspots to bypass and use localDNS resolver so that we don't need to turn off the app

The list should be accessible within the UI so admins can select what can be bypassed

August 9, 2022

Steve Staden

marked this post as

developing (live in <90 days)

Right now our focus on development is for macOS RC as we've seen most issues related to macOS.

Steve Staden

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next (developing in <60 days)

Alex

We should also have an option, as the tenant admin, to have the client fail-open completely if it's unable to reach DNSFilter's servers and utilize whatever DNS is available via DHCP. I know this isn't ideal for all situations, but it completely resolves the captive portal issue.
Something where the roaming client fails-open upon a connection issue, then continually tries to regain connection, should be a good balance of ease of access and security.
Of course, this should be optional.

Evan

I would also like this feature..not sure if it should be a separate request?

Steve Staden

Evan: I do consider it separate and we're discussing a fail-open option that admins could configure. I believe this request is for that - https://dnsfilter.canny.io/known-issues/p/roaming-client-failover. I think I'll should adjust the title just to it's more clear.

Justin

I don't want just a list, I want the system to be able to detect and allow it automatically. The amount of tickets we are seeing from clients recently is on the rise. Sending clients to captive.apple.com has stopped working also. There needs to be a holistic fix to this issue.

Steve Staden

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up next2

All, I've merged and updated the description. We want to improve the overall experience when using a "captive portal", meaning when you are presented with an acceptance page on a hotel, airline, restaurant wifi network.

Steve Staden

Merged in a post:

Improve the "captive portal" experience for macOS roaming clients

Steve Staden

When using the macOS roaming client either with a hotspot, airline or hotel portal the roaming client doesn't allow a user to proceed with agreeing to the terms.

September 14, 2023

Preston

I think the client needs to be able to determine if a captive portal is present, and then divert to local DNS or provide some sort of way to passthrough the queries.

A master list of captive portals will always be one step behind as there is no way to ever know every single CP address that exists.

Steve Staden

marked this post as

under review (next candidate)

We're investigating ways to improve this experience.

Steve Staden

Merged in a post:

Hotspot failure for roaming clients

Sean

When joining hotspot's like Mariott's wifi for example, the roaming client can't reach the internet to resolve DNS so ultimately the wifi network can't be joined. Is there a way to solve this? Similarly when traveling on airplane wifi, same issue. roaming client had to be uninstalled so service could be joined

June 9, 2023

Steve Staden

Voters - just to be clear, is this to get around any "Captive Portal" issues experienced by users? If so, just wanted to point to https://help.dnsfilter.com/hc/en-us/articles/13124351011731-Roaming-Client-and-Captive-Portal where we've been collecting that list. Would love to get your feedback, thanks.

Cole

Steve Staden: correct. I used that list and others from reddit to build the whitelist for it, but if that ever changes or new ones are added its not a great solution for medium sized businesses with an already overworked admin team and really frustrates our execs.

Steve Staden

Cole: Thanks and totally understand.

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