Captive Portal Detection
UXI hardware sensors implement Captive Portal Discovery and Captive Portal Identification to determine if the device is behind a captive portal.
The sensor will send an HTTP request to http://cdn.capenetworks.io/auth, expecting a 200 response code with "Success" in the response body. If the sensor receives any unexpected response, it will consider this as the presence of a captive portal and/or proxy.
Alternatively, if the configured network supports RFC8910 or RFC8908, the sensor will query the captive portal API endpoint that is reported in the DHCPv4 lease, DHCPv6 lease, or Router Advertisement packet for IPv6.
Captive Portal Interaction
In order for a sensor to test a captive portal, a recording of the user actions required to navigate the portal must be provided to the HPE Aruba Networking UXI support team.
Prerequisites: Before starting, make sure that you have configured the SSID on the dashboard and have assigned the SSID to one or more sensors. The sensor should report an error that says "unexpected captive portal or proxy".
To correctly configure a captive portal, support will need the following details:
The UXI Recorder output (.side) file.
The SSID associated with the Captive Portal.
The sensor serial number(s) to confirm the captive portal is present.
Note: If your captive portal requires login credentials, please create a service account specifically for the sensors to test. Using personal credentials is not recommended.
The process to record user actions is as follows:
Install the UXI Recorder Firefox extension.
Notice: In January 2025, Google Chrome stopped supporting extensions that use Manifest v2. As a result, we now only publish on Firefox.
Ensure you are connected to the correct Wi-Fi SSID, but not authenticated to the portal.
On Mac, you may see a popup screen for your captive portal. When you see this, click cancel in the bottom right.
Open Firefox.
Click on the UXI Recorder extension (the green smiley face).
Click the Record button - this will open a new window and display the captive portal.
The extension will indicate "Already Online" if a captive portal is not detected and you have internet access. You need to make sure you are not already authenticated to avoid seeing this message.
In the new tab that is opened after pressing record, complete all steps to log in to the captive portal.
When the captive portal process is completed, the recording will automatically be downloaded. If you do not see the recording, navigate back to the original tab, locate the extension icon again, and click the Stop button.
Find the side-recording.json file in your downloads.
To ensure that you have recorded the interaction correctly, you can open the file and check if commands like "click," "type," etc., are recorded under the "Commands" section. If it's empty, you will need to record it again. Example output:
..........
{
"id": "cfcfdf76-48a4-4cc0-8655-3c0f8b3d9879",
"name": "Captive Portal Test",
"commands": [
{
"command": "click",
"target": "id=email_field",
"targets": [
[
"................
Lastly, you will need to contact support@capenetworks.com and include the sensor serial(only required to identify the UXI account name), the name of the SSID, and the recording output file. The captive portal recording only needs to be submitted once for a given SSID profile.
Example of Recording The Captive Portal
See the example below for how to use the UXI Recorder extension for Firefox on Mac.