Smoothwall Student Wii Captive portal niggles

[_techie_]

hi.

 

I'm using unifi with smoothwall captive portal on an open SSID.

I've heard mixed things from some of 6th form students on the grapevine that it doesn't work even though I can't replicate any issues with my Pixel 3a phone on A11.

I've seen that on certain phones it can take a reboot of the phone for the captive portal to come up even though the phone has received a correct IP address.

Smoothwall reports logs of 0 in the web filter, and diagnosis of the device shows HTTPS sites not being displayed, only cert errors. This ties in with the fact the user hasn't had yet to authenticate, due to the captive portal not appearing in normal process.

I'm not pushing the HTTPS inspection cert, and have a transparent auth policy setup for the subnet on smoothwall. Am I missing something? Do I need to tweak a setting?

 

Laptops seem way more flakey with the captive portal appearing (Chromebooks esp) but it's not really being used in lessons, just for 6th form BYOD devices for free study use.

 

I'm trying to decide whether to ditch the captive portal altogether, and provide Radius access via MSCHAPv2, which isn't particularly secure if there certificates aren't up to date.

 

Suggestions please?