Captive Portal and Windows 7

[mharding]

We have captive portal setup in redirect mode. It's working fine for iPhones, iPads, Mac OS X, and Windows XP, but we are having problems with Windows 7 clients. They get a message that they need to authenticate before having Internet access, but when they go to a webpage I see the captive portal URL flash in the address bar, and then it goes back to the webpage and says the page cannot be displayed.

Is anyone else having problems with Windows 7/Internet Explorer 8 and captive portal?

I ran Wireshark and never saw the 302 redirect packet in the capture. The firewall log shows an incomplete session to the L3 interface for the Windows 7 client.

[rahmant]

Where did you run the capture?  There's a bit of a disconnect - you likely could not have gotten the captive portal window unless the redirect was seen on the client.  From the capture, what do you see?

Tariq

[mharding]

The captive portal runs on the internal L3 interface. I open up Internet Explorer 8, go to google.com, and get a page cannot be displayed error. The capture only showed RST packets from the firewall.

[mharding]

The laptop was having some other odd problems. We're going to re-image the laptop. The captive portal would only display in Firefox.

I've read about some other odd problems with Windows 7 and captive portal from other vendors. I'm guessing it has something to do with Internet Explorer 8. Some people recommended using compatibility view, but I never got a chance to test it.