Captive Portal SSL issues

[TechMonkey]

Can anyone confirm if Android has specific issues with Captive Portal?

 

We are trying to set up a guest network, mainly for traders to a Christmas Fair to be able to get on and use their payments systems, but it would be nice to sort it once and for all for parents and visitors to get on and us to have a modicum of control. So our plan was to have a captive portal to get them to install the Smoothwall Certificate, using the getmitm url, and then redirect them on to the Ruckus guest pass generator page. The issue we keep hitting is that on our Android handsets all we get is a certificate error as soon as it tries to get the captive portal. The issue seems to be that once connected to the WLAN it opens Chrome and tries to go to Google, which is an SSL page. When this is redirected to the Captive Portal it generates the error, rightly so. BUt why is it trying to go to Google first and how do we stop it?

 

It isn't just with Captive portal, any redirect seems to cause this, and I just know all the parents will just get confused or complain that we have an issue.

 

Are we actually better of publishing a username and password to a WLAN, monitoring it and then just banning any device that tries anything dodgy?

 

Ta

[TechMonkey]

Well eventually got there. It is a known issue with Chrome on Android. There is a bug tracker for it and everything. So we are ignoring it and will leave instructions for people to either use the default Android browser to sign in or to go to a http site to get the captive page.