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I have an access point hosting a login page (which doesn't have actual internet access) and I'm using dnsmasq to answer all DNS requests with the IP address of this page. If an android device connects, I want it to know that it's connected to a captive portal and show the "Sign-in to wifi network" prompt but this doesn't happen (the device just silently connects to the AP), although wireshark shows that the http GET requests for "/generate_204" are properly responded with "HTTP/1.1 200 OK". Any suggestions why this could be happening? Could there be something other than the response for "/generate_204" that android checks? I'm guessing that the detection fails if the device finds out that there's no internet access.

Thanks

Awais Chishti
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  • Have you tried responding to the `GET /generate_204 HTTP/1.1` request with a temporary redirect rather than `200`? – kasperd Dec 30 '16 at 14:03
  • Yes I've tried a 302 response before. But then I found a working captive portal replying with 200. I've been trying it with 200 since then. – Awais Chishti Dec 30 '16 at 14:28
  • Don't attempt to respond to `/generate_204` at all. Doing so tells the device that there is _not_ a captive portal. You should simply return a 302 redirect to the captive portal. – Michael Hampton Dec 30 '16 at 19:00
  • @MichaelHampton That's not how `/generate_204` works. When `/generate_204` was introduced it was already common practice for captive portals to produce a redirect for anything. The idea of `/generate_204` is to work with existing captive portals which redirects it without knowing that there is anything special about that URL. If there is no captive portal access to `/generate_204` will receiver a `204` status code which is how devices know that there is no captive portal. – kasperd Dec 30 '16 at 23:38
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    It worked with a 200 response. I configured dnsmasq to reply with a random (non-local) IP instead of the server's IP. For the redirection I used iptables to forward all http requests to the local server instead. The sign-in prompt shows up now. – Awais Chishti Jan 03 '17 at 16:38

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