Re: Question about captive portal problem

[Ties Jan Hefting <tj hefting net>]

On 02-12-2015 22:06, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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

Hi Dan,

Good to know about NetworkManager's role in captive portal handling.

Thank you for pointing me into the right direction. I will head over to
GNOME's Bugzilla to ask them this question.

TJ