Re: Question about captive portal problem

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2015-12-02 at 21:23 +0100, Ties Jan Hefting wrote:
> Hello all!
>
> First of all: thanks for all the hard work of the Network Manager. It
> makes networking as easy as pie! :)
>
> I have a problem with the captive portal and I think I should direct
> my 
> questions to this mailing list. If not, please let me know who/where
> I 
> should ask about this. ;)
>
> In my country there is free WiFi in a lot of trains. It uses a
> captive 
> portal, which is detected perfectly and shows the web authentication 
> window to login. To login I only have to tick a tickbox and click a 
> button. However, when I click this button, nothing happens. So, I
> close 
> the window and go in Firefox to the captive portal manually, and
> there 
> the button works.
>
> One thing I noticed is that it opens a new window/tab after I've
> logged 
> in successfully. If I take a look at the source code, this button 
> submits a form using JavaScript. The form only consists of the 
> beforementioned tickbox. In the 'form' tag the 'target' attribute is
> set 
> to 'connectiontarget', but I can't find that elsewhere in the source 
> code, nor do I know what the HTML spec says about this non-standard 
> value. I know that my Android smartphone handles this well, while
> there 
> seems to be no distinction between desktop and mobile in the login
> page, 
> so I think it's the same web page.
> http://imgur.com/a/BfmY
> Screenshots can be found here: http://imgur.com/a/BfmY
> http://imgur.com/a/BfmYF
>
> My questions are:
> 1. Is there a log file I can take a look at to find out what's going 
> wrong here?
> 2. Is this a known problem? If so, is there a solution/workaround?
> 3. If this is unexpected behaviour, where can I file a bug report on 
> this?

So NetworkManager itself just handles detecting whether you are behind
a portal or not; neither it (or nm-applet) actually show the login
browser window.  That's handled by your desktop environment, in your
case GNOME Shell, so that's where the bug really lies.  I'd imagine the
problem could be that the login windows run a pretty limited browser,
but I'm surprised that it wouldn't handle the Javascript parts.

Best thing to do is to file a bug in the GNOME Bugzilla at 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnome-shell against
the "portal-helper" component and include the source of the login page.
 They should be able to help you track it down.

Good luck!
Dan