We are in the midst of testing a "setup portal" for admission to our dot1X
SSID. It is
a typical portal setup, with a captive DNS that points the web browser at the
portal web
page, with explanations of how to connect and items to download (evaluating
XpressConnect now for this).
It works fine with PCs and Macs as expected, once they connect and get their
DHCP
credentials, the lookups hit the captive DNS, the portal address is returned,
the user
is presented with the page as desired.
Not so much with Droids. They don't seem to do anything predictably. After
several
hours testing with running packet captures, there are some unusual behaviors
exhibited
by a Droid (well, unusual as compared to a computer, but perhaps not so unusual
for a
phone):
* When they receive DHCP information, it doesn't appear to clear / flush /
reset /
reinitialize anything whatsoever.
* if the Browser or other Apps were using the network with cached IPs, then
continue
to do so (no DNS lookup, they just keep on talking)
* Browser caching is "extremely aggressive" in that it's difficult to get it
to return
or refresh any given page
Trying this from a freshly-rebooted Droid doesn't fare much better, they
intialize most
things via 3G before they bother trying wireless.
Has anyone else tried doing a "portal" environment for Droids or other mobile
devices?
It is looking like we need to publish / encourage / advertise a particular URL
they will
have to manually browse to, rather than depend on the portal capture and
redirect
Jeff
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