I've often wondered two things about the captive portal in the States (e.g. AT&T)...
1. I'm logging in with my Honors credentials, you know what reservation I'm attached to, why not manage the session expiration based on the checkout date of the reservation.
2. Why do I need my room number to log in... Again you know what Honors account the user is associated with, why not look up the res automagically; or for that matter... if as a DIA my business is sooooo valuable, does it really matter if I may not be a guest and use a few minutes of wifi at a property I'm passing through for whatever ancillary reason? (I see all of the counter arguments, and I'm not even sure it would be a good idea myself, but I have to ask)
Originally Posted by
born sleepy
Y'all it's 2017 and we've these things called "cookies" for decades now. So why do I have to sign in daily? Set a cookie for the duration of the stay instead of dropping the connection usually at the worst possible time e.g. in the middle of a VPN session or a download. SO irritating.
The problem is that a client-side cookie would not eliminate the connection drop. The only way to prevent that is for the session to not expire on the wireless LAN controller... Once the session expires on the WLC, that's when it stops passing traffic on to the Internet and redirects to the captive portal.
After that point, and
only at the time your web browser of choice with the stored cookie has made a web request would a cookie speed you in getting authenticated, but at that point there's a good chance VPN connections have been dropped and downloads interrupted anyway, especially since if you're in the middle of a VPN session or a S4B call or whatever, you may not be making HTTP requests that the WLC would see anyway.