On upgrade to Catalina, the captive portal wifi login page no longer appears. Because of this I can no longer connect to public wifi portals.
Steps: Connect to a public wifi
Expected result: Captive network login dialog screen should appear
Actual result: Wifi shows as connected, but no login screen, and no internet access, no DNS resolution, not able to access any IPs on the network
MacBook Pro
This is a bug in macOS Catalina (still present with the latest patchlevel, i.e. 10.15 with the supplemental update from 15th October 2019). For some reason the Captive Portal Assistant (the app that produces the captive portal popup window whenever you connect to a WiFi hotspot) won't start automatically.
There are two workarounds:
option 1: Either you can manually start the Captive Portal Assistant app manually after you have connected to the WiFi network. This will bring up the captive portal popup window and you can unlock Internet access there. (Really no need to boot in recovery mode, etc. !)
option 2: From this blog post: To bring back the captive portal window automatically whenever you connect to a captive portal-protected WiFi network you can create a LaunchDaemon that watches for WiFi changes and automatically opens the Captive Portal Assistant app.
Create a plist file with the service definition somewhere:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" \
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant.plist</string>
<key>LowPriorityIO</key>
<true/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>open</string>
<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/Captive Network Assistant.app</string>
</array>
<key>WatchPaths</key>
<array>
<string>/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
and apply it:
launchctl load my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant.plist
launchctl start my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant
check https://poweruser.blog/macos-catalina-wifi-issue-captive-portal-broken-45610cc016b5 for more details.
type in the url for login into a browser. It will say "no internet". Now, log out of the system. Tick the box which says reopen windows when logging back in. Log back in, now the browser url should load. Sometimes, i have to log in and out 2 times in a row to get it to work. I know that this is not a good solution, but i thought i might as well take some time out of my day to write this since i've read some of the users rebooting to fix this issue( consumes more time than log out/in).
The fix for me was just manually opening the captive log in prompt.
Open terminal
Type
open /System/Library/CoreServices/Captive
Then press tab a couple times and it should auto complete the rest for the captive application then press enter and it opened right up and was on the correct captive login page
Thanks, deleting all files in LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents for Tunnelblick did the trick for me. Restarted and voila.
Yes! I just tried and mine is fixed! woohoo finally! with 10.15.2
I will agree, the only way I've been able to get this to work is to connect to the public wifi (which technically connects but can't login because captive portal doesn't load), and then reboot. Upon reboot, as long as the computer reconnects immediately to the same public wifi, it will pop up with a captive portal. What the heck?!
I did not have anything listed under my Login Items for my user profile. So I removed the several files in LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons and rebooted. The captive window finally appeared. Now I had to approve a GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle program to run (which I'm assuming is what keeps Chrome updated). I'm hoping it wasn't that which was preventing the captive window but from one of the other files I removed.
In 10.15.2 I found that I had to go into the Library and actually create a launchDaemon folder and then the problem resolved.
my steps to resolve the issue were
Same here, only reboot to safe mode works for me. Seems there is kind of bug here. Pls fix it Apple.
For those that are having this issue at public wifi spots that require a captive login screen to agree and connect, but that the window will not pop up-- making it essentially impossible to connect to wifi on mac.
I am extremely happy to also confirm that this issue appears to be fixed with the macOS Catalina 10.15.2 update!
I can reach hotspot login page using Safari trying to access a HTTP address when I login with a non-admin user. If user is admin, Safari can't reach the hotspot login page. If the URL is HTTPS, Safari can't help as well.
The only thing that really fixed it for me was to remove all .plist files from /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons directories.
Of course it caused me some trouble and I needed to reinstall some softwares after that, but it really got the issue fixed :/
Try booting into safe mode. It should let you log in normally. Then reboot to normal mode.
Connect to wifi network, then fire up terminal and sudo the following command:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Captive\ Network\ Assistant.app/Contents/MacOS/Captive\ Network\ Assistant ; exit;
Voila.
That's what I did (delete the launch agents and daemons). So far, no problems. However, its possible that some of the apps that depend on these might not return to their most recent state when you open them. Perhaps, they will require you to log in again, or they might return to default settings rather than any custom settings you had.
This solution also worked for me, it's not a perfect solution but it works. Now when I need to login to my captive portal I still receive an error like I'm not connected but if I go to a site I know will trigger the login page (for some reason this is Feedly for me) it pops up in the browser vs when it connected in previous OS versions it would popup in it's own small login screen independent of the browser. I backed up both folders to a temp folder just in case I needed anything, so far Microsoft Office complained about having missing updater files and re-downloaded it's auto updater to fix that issue but otherwise everything is working ok. I hope Apple has a better solution for this soon.
wifi not working - captive portal login screen does not appear
