I recently purchased a Metal to use as a long distance wifi adapter on my boat. The Metal is set up as CPE, and is connected to another wifi router on the boat. This way, I can have onboard devices (laptops, mobile phones, iPads, etc) all connected via the wifi router, with internet connectivity supplied to the network via the Metal.

This all works well in most circumstances. However, in some marinas I visit, the wifi is set up using a captive portal. The connection appears open, but when you first connect and try to open any webpage, you are redirected to the marina's login webpage, where you have to enter a user name and password. This works fine when you are connecting directly from a laptop, etc. However, in my setup, the Metal is not passing through the redirect, so my browser never sees the login page, and I can't connect to the wifi. The particular system I'm dealing with at the moment is using Untangle as its captive portal software.

Any suggestions on how to resolve this and get connected?

Thanks.

Hello sir,

Did you get an answer to your problem?

I have a similar setup for my boat, however, I've not been able to get the wifi to be passed through the router to the LAN. I tried just using the quickset and set my groove to CPE,connected to the wifi network and set the 951 to home AP quickset. Still can't get it working right. not sure what setting I'm missing.

My last marina had the same redirect like you are trying to deal with. A friend there was the one who recommended this setup to me. I've contacted him to try and get an answer to your problem as I expect I'll experience the same thing someday too.

J

Trying the same method to connect to "optimumwifi" (a WiFi mesh deployed as part of Optimum Online service). I plan to use this connection as a failover WAN link - in case building internet goes down but the local tower is still operational.

I have a theory:

I think the direction this needs to go will involve the use a Laptop with a spoofed MAC address (borrowed from your Metal/Grove WLAN interface) being walked over down the docks until in range of the Marina hotspot.

You can complete the Captive Portal registration process with the laptop. After this is done, when the Metal tries to connect, it may be let trough past the captive portal as it's MAC address is already sitting in the ARP cache on the Captive Portal.

Again this is just a theory, so don't shoot me if it doesn't work.

If this does work I hope the expiration period for your session survives at least until the Captive Portal is restarted. Otherwise this would not be a viable solution to this problem.

Still having the problem described in the original post. Any suggestions?